Jim Liddle

Amazon Cloud Journal on Ulitzer Following on from my last post, Securing Applications on the Amazon Elastic Cloud, One of the biggest questions I often see asked is “Is Amazon EC2 as a platform secure”? This is like saying is my vanilla network secure?  As you do to your internal network you can take some steps to make the environment as secure as you can, such as: - First read the Amazon Security Whitepaper and the Amazon discussion of Security processes - Ensure the system key is encrypted at start-up - Ensure you plan for load balancing in case an instance goes down. Ensure ... (more)

Cloud Computing Best Practices

Some of the key things to think about when putting your application on the cloud are discussed below. Cloud computing is relatively new, and best practice is still being established. However we can learn from earlier technologies and concepts such as utility compute, SaaS, outsourcing and even internal enterprise centre management, as well as from experience with vendors such as Amazon a... (more)

How to Secure Amazon Elastic Cloud

 Cloud Computing on Ulitzer In this post I will walk you through the  high level  of securing a normal tiered application running on EC2. First I will cover the basics of what EC2 provides and then briefly discuss how this can be used in a real life scenario. Security Groups For Network security EC2 provides a security groups, security groups are essentially inbound firewalls  suited t... (more)

Amazon S3 vs Amazon EBS on the Elastic Cloud

Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) is a new type of storage designed specifically for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS allows you to create volumes that can be mounted as devices by EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes behave as if they were raw unformatted external hard drives and can be formatted using a file system such as ext3 (Linux) or NTFS (Windows) and mounted on an EC2 insta... (more)