AWS re:Invent 2013 Recap — Taking On the Enterprise

This week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) held its second annual re:Invent conference. For the past two days, Amazon has been announcing a wide variety of feature enhancements to existing services as well as publicizing new services. Even before these announcements, AWS was so far ahead of their competition in features, customers, and rate of innovation that comparing competitors’ offerings to AWS was almost comical.

Moving Past the OpenStack API Debate

There has been a great deal of passionate debate over the last few months within the OpenStack community. There is one camp that is advocating for building APIs that are compatible with Amazon Web Services (AWS) APIs, while the other camp argues for augmenting the existing OpenStack APIs. Those in favor of making the APIs …

Security Questions from VMworld 2013

While at VMworld 2013, I started to ask 5 security questions that have been bothering me for some time now. Some of these questions apparently have no answers currently and others only have operational answers, no technology. Security of a secure hybrid cloud is a mix of procedures, policies, operations, and technology. These questions are about various aspects of virtual and cloud environments that have been nagging at me for some time now as well as problems I have faced managing our own cloud instances. Perhaps you have questions you would like to add to the list, if so please share.

VMware NSX Conversations

At VMworld 2013 and on the Virtualization Security Podcast there were many conversations about VMware NSX. These conversations ranged from how will we implement this new technology to security, scale, and other technical questions. In addition, NSX and what was needed to make it a reality may be the answer to a nagging security question. Brad Hedlund, from the VMware NSX team, joined the Virtualization Security Podcast to share with us some of the details around VMware NSX prior to the podcast.

Antifragile Systems: Designing for Agility vs. Stability

For many years, the focus in IT has been on building robust systems that invested heavily in avoiding failures. To accomplish this goal, methodical processes were implemented to guide IT through a list of known use cases so that systems could try to avoid failing and have a plan for recovery if a failure did …