Alexey Bokov's weblog

Update in Amazon Web Services:

Sun Grid Engine’s top engineer Richard Hierlmeier wrote article ( and some bash scripts which implements it – btw why you not to put it them onto your cvs? ) about using SDM in compute cloud ( here’s EC2 as example, I suppose that GoGrid can be used also without too many changes ) – Using SDM Cloud Adapter to Manage Solaris Zones.

Sun released new version of Sun Grid Engine – 6.2 Update 3. That’s new:

• Amazon EC2 adapter – SDM Cloud Service Adapter now is avaialable to scale SGE cluster in EC2 – they only need to have OpenVPN installed on instances, and special configuration for IP addresses ( SGE is still very picky about DNS ) – more about restriction is here and here’s bash scripts which used for EC2 deployment. By the way I see that OpenSolaris is still only one OS which available for SGE on EC2, if you’re looking for some SGE/EC2 solutions you may check out Convergence proejct which deal with SGE/GemFire cluster installation on EC2 – see Installing SGE on EC2, or Hedeby installation on EC2.
• Now only one JVM can be runned on master or managed host – in previous version SGE ran 3 JVM on every host – one for cs_vm ( configuration service ), executor_vm ( executor component ) and rp_vm ( resource provider ). In SGE terminology it called SDM simple install.
• Now SGE have Exclusive Scheduling – this helps to guarantee predictable performance and to avoid interference when a job is not using all of the slots that are available on a host
• Sun declared that now SGE have Microsoft Vista Support ( don’t think that there’s too much SGE installations on Vista ) and also some usual marking speech about  Power Saving features 🙂

upd. Also there’s new Sun Studio 12 Update 1 is available too.

The central idea we were working on was this idea of de-localized information — information for which I didn’t care what computer it was stored on. It didn’t depend on any particular computer. I didn’t know the identities of other computers in the ensemble that I was working on. I just knew myself and the cybersphere, or sometimes we called it the tuplesphere, or just a bunch of information floating around. We used the analogy — we talked about helium balloons. We used a million ways to try and explain this idea – hn Markoff and Clay Shirky talk to David Gelernter – Lord of the Cloud

Stallman dismisses cloud computing as industry bluster. “It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign,” he said – huh, i agree that anything which contain “cloud” keyword have too much marketing stuff , but it’s not really stupid. There’s too much marketing stuff in this area ( and goGrid’s guys are the very first for this ‘too much marketing’ ), but let’s look on amazon ec2 – it’s really great amazing thing – last 7 years my work related with various size cluster’s, and last year my “server provider” is amazon – and I may say that amazon is much convenient than any company-owned-datacenter. For my it’s big deal when I can get 100 servers for 10 mins and run some job on them. There’s too much marketing noise in cloud industry, but it works and it works almost fine.
ps. Another point for cloud computing – it’s Steve Ballmer on defining the cloud.

• cloud platforms
• cloud verndors
• Amazon EC2 vs GoGrid vs Mosso
• How LinkedIn grew Bumpersticker to be the “Biggest Ruby on Rails app in the World? and Web Scalability Practices: Bumper Sticker on Rails
• The Private Cloud: Enterprise-ready on and off premise by Stephen Herrod
• Defining private clouds – Part 1, Part 2 – by Bernard Golden

Guys from Amazon posts in Amazon Web Services Blog interesting document – AWS Security White Paper.
Main points –

• there’s no backup for data ( EBS, S3, anything), but all data redundantly stored in multiple physical locations
• for EC2 they have four security levels – host OS ( access : only AWS administrators ),  guest OS ( access : only customers, AWS admins can’t log onto guest OS ),  Firewall ( indirectly configured by customers, AWS admins also have access ) , Amazon EC2 API ( access : only customers ).
• all guest OS running by hypervisor XEN – so instances have no direct access to hardware resources, and can’t read-write any data which owned another instances – including network packets, disk devices and memory.
• network traffic ( for different instances ) can not be sniffed, external DDoS secured by firewal, port scanning inside network prohibited by Acceptable Use Policy ( customer will be blocked for this, I suppose ), instances can’t use IP spoofing ( because of hypervisor Xen :-). Anyway, Amazon reccomend to use SSL for network connections.
• Security in S3 and SimpleDB based in ACL ( access control list ) – only data owner may edit access permission.
• All data in S3 and SimpleDB stored ‘as is’ without any encryption. If you want to be more secure – you should store encrypted data – “Encrypting before sending to SimpleDB guarantees that no party, including AWS, has access to sensitive customer data”.  Once you delete data from S3 or SimpleDB all external links to them will be unaccessible – “area is then made available only for write operations and the data is overwritten by newly stored data”.  S3 and SimpleDB nodes use SSL for network connection, so there’s no chances for Man-In-The-Middle attack.