Cloud Computing Google Group

Re: [ Cloud Computing ] what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

ray.dep...@gmail.com (Ray DePena) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 03:09:32 UT

May be. Isn't it something like 70% of security violations from insiders?
Insiders couldn't simply copy a HDD and walk it out with cloud..... :-)

Re: [ Cloud Computing ] what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

rnug...@yahoo.com (Ray Nugent) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 01:15:26 UT

I don't think Cloud causes downsizing. I think it just takes the screwdriver out of your back pocket. It may lead you to learn a new language or two like Puppet or Chef. It might motivate you to train on Xen or VMware. It will certainly bring a whole new set of issues to deal with as you have 8-10 time the number of servers to manage as you once did and they can now disappear in an instant because one of you colleagues that did not get downsized clobbered your virtual datacenter full of VMs...

RE: [ Cloud Computing ] what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

robert_peg...@xiotech.com (Peglar, Robert) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:46:01 UT

There is also the well-known BOINC approach to running certain types of
parallel (or embarrassingly so) codes. It combines some cloud-like
aspects of computing with some grid-like aspects (e.g. schedulers,
batches of tasks, etc.)

Rob

[mailto:cloud-computing@google groups.com] On Behalf Of Miha Ahronovitz

RE: [ Cloud Computing ] what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

rao.dronamr...@sbcglobal.net (Rao Dronamraju) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:29:04 UT

Worse yet, the laid-off admins working as baggage handlers for the CEOs
private jet:-)

_____
[mailto:cloud-computing@google groups.com] On Behalf Of Jan Klincewicz
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 6:20 PM
To: cloud-computing@googlegroups.c om
Computing?

POTENTIALLY, yes... Chances are, running your apps in the Cloud, the admins

Re: [ Cloud Computing ] what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

jan.klincew...@gmail.com (Jan Klincewicz) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:27:57 UT

Benmerar:
As Rao states, many (not all) HPC apps tend to run on grids, and to my
knowledge, grids are often comprised pf physical machines as opposed to
VMs. The nature of HPC apps with which I was familiar (and it has probably
been 5-6 years since I was close to those) was that they were compute
intensive, and generally could consume a full CPU at the time (but that was

Re: [ Cloud Computing ] what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

mij...@sbcglobal.net (Miha Ahronovitz) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:21:16 UT

Benmerar Tarik Zakaria <snipernin...@gmail.com> writes
"If we don't put those applications in hypervisors (for performance
reasons)... in the high performance field ...[may we] deploy
them on the cloud, to take advantage of the infrastructure available to us."
If you mean HPC with MPIs, therefore parallel code, the answer may be some hybrid clouds. I can see your meaning of the cloud here is ability to use instances of nodes for computers someone else owns. This means you need some local resource managers to create a parallel environment , like Sun Grid Engine. In a tightly integrated application (like Sun Grid Engine with Cluster tools), the SGE will decide for each slave job how to start it how to stop it, how to distribute slaves, usage policy. It may be possible, but I am not 100% sure, that you may place some slave jobs in instances of nodes of Amazon.com, as long as SGE controls their placement and not the MPI application itself. SGE can connect to AWS EC2 via a cloud connector feature and the parallel environment (which is an exclusive to parallel applications space) can include external nodes. This means we have a hybrid cloud and the resource management is done from the private cloud with SGE.

Re: [ Cloud Computing ] what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

jan.klincew...@gmail.com (Jan Klincewicz) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:19:41 UT

POTENTIALLY, yes... Chances are, running your apps in the Cloud, the admins
will at least not personally HATE you like the ones still surviving and
overworked since their company just terminated four or five of their
lifelong colleagues because of "downsizing" while the CEO uses private jet
to shuttle his kids back and forth from college to Xmas Break in Aspen. I

RE: [ Cloud Computing ] what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

rao.dronamr...@sbcglobal.net (Rao Dronamraju) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 23:10:35 UT

Benmerar,
I hope you have not mis-understood my postings about hypervisor and its
security. I did not post them to promote any FUD. I posted it to create some
discussion about hypervisor security in particular and cloud security in
general. So you do not need to be worried that much about the possibility of

what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

snipernin...@gmail.com (Benmerar Tarik Zakaria) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:47:41 UT

Thanks Rao and Jan for your reply. And let me ask another question to
make clear my stand point:
If we don't put those applications in hypervisors(for performance
reasons), could we keep the security in such a system ? Is it in
opposite, it's much easier to manage because it's just un application

Re: [ Cloud Computing ] what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

rnug...@yahoo.com (Ray Nugent) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 02:47:13 UT

So Jan, you're saying the Cloud is potentially MORE secure than a physical data center? :-)
Happy New Year!
______________________________ __
To: cloud-computing@googlegroups.c om
Sent: Thu, December 31, 2009 4:39:37 PM
I don't like to generalize about admins. I run across some pretty competent and loyal ones from time to time. Inasmuch as there is little difference between securing a VM and a physical box, once you have "hardened" a VM it is much easier to use that as a template and clone other VMS from it using a "locked down" image unless an an exceptions is required (and documented.)

Re: [ Cloud Computing ] what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

jan.klincew...@gmail.com (Jan Klincewicz) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:39:37 UT

I don't like to generalize about admins. I run across some pretty competent
and loyal ones from time to time. Inasmuch as there is little difference
between securing a VM and a physical box, once you have "hardened" a VM it
is much easier to use that as a template and clone other VMS from it using a

Re: [ Cloud Computing ] what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

rnug...@yahoo.com (Ray Nugent) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:41:30 UT

It's not the technology that is at play regarding security. The problem is that there tend to be a lot more virtual servers and since they are ephemeral admins don't secure them as well ("hey, if a VM is breached, just kill it and start a new one"...). As with all things security, it's the people factor that is the weak link.

Re: [ Cloud Computing ] what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

jan.klincew...@gmail.com (Jan Klincewicz) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 21:43:28 UT

I would at least say that hypervisor-based servers are at least no
inherently less secure than physical servers at this point. Open Source
variants in fact (specifically Xen) have folks like the Department of
Defense and National Security Agency contributing to the security. I would
not say they are 100% secure, but I would not say (nor expect) that about

Re: [ Cloud Computing ] what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

jstar...@nimbusdb.com (Jim Starkey) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:17:31 UT

Linux, Windows, or any modern Unix can be administered to run multiple
independent applications securely. But it requires a cost, skill set,
and experience that dwarfs the cost of another server. So it's cheaper
to throw hardware at the problem, and cheaper still to throw VMs at the
problem.
So, yes, it is possible to unvetted binary apps on a shared server, but

RE: [ Cloud Computing ] what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

rao.dronamr...@sbcglobal.net (Rao Dronamraju) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:58:51 UT

Not sure if I understand your question correctly, but it shouldn't matter if
the code is a compiled C or Fortran binary. Since Hypervisor runs at a
privileged level, it can pretty much do what it wants. As we all know, the
fundamental hacking technique that most hackers use is escalation of
privileges as soon as they get access to a system, here hacking into a