Learn All About the Amazon Simple Workflow Service – Two New Videos

Another great new post by Jeff, the voice may not be that great, but the visual is good…:

The Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF) is used to power highly scalable distributed systems at NASA (case study), Sage Bionetworks (case study), and a number of our other customers.

In order to help you to better understand SWF, Balan Subramanian, SWF Product Manager, hosted an hour-long webinar:

Maxim Fateev, AWS Principal Engineer, spent another hour discussing the Flow Framework:

SOURCE

Overview of Microsoft’s Windows Azure

The AWS CISO on AWS Security

Again a good blog by Jeff on AWS Blog…

Do follow to understand security on AWS Cloud…

As you can tell by looking at the AWS Security and Compliance Center, we take security seriously. You can find information about our certifications and accreditations in the center, along with links to four security white papers.

I would also like to recommend a new AWS video to you. In the video, AWS VP and CISO Stephen Schmidt discusses security and privacy in the AWS Cloud, in concrete and specific terms:

Here are my favorite quotes from the video:

No hard drive leaves our facilities intact. Period.

I run security for the company. I don’t have access to our data centers because I don’t need to be there on a regular basis.

If you happen to talk to someone who doesn’t quite grasp what cloud security means, please share this video with them …

SOURCE

Automating Your Infrastructure with AWS

Demonstration of infrastructure automation with Amazon Web Services.

Demo: Introduction to AWS

View more presentations from Amazon Web Services

SOURCE : Demo: Introduction to AWS, Cambridge

InfoWorld : The battle to stop Amazon Web Services starts here

A good blog by David Linthicum… do read!Piston Computing’s integration with VMware’s Cloud Foundry surprised many, but you should expect more anti-AWS efforts…

Piston Computing plans to build a bridge to EMC VMware’s Cloud Foundry, meaning it will link Piston’s own OpenStack-based cloud IaaS offering. What does this mean for cloud development? It’s the start of many other such integration efforts, I suspect, to battle the meteoric rise of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Cloud Foundry is a popular open source platform service, which VMware promotes as a PaaS for any infrastructure. Piston is one of many companies that rely on OpenStack. The OpenStack fraternity includes Akamai, AMD, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, CloudScaling, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, NTT, Rackspace, and Yahoo. The OpenStack movement is really a competitive pushback on AWS in the IaaS space. Both Cloud Foundry and Piston’s OpenStack are available under the Apache 2 license.

If you’re working on an enterprise cloud computing strategy, you should be well aware that relationships such as the Piston/VMware deal are forged for the economic benefit of both companies by making the combination more attractive than either offering on its own. That’s why we’ll see more and more such IaaS/PaaS partnerships or even acquisitions in the next 18 months — especially involving other OpenStack providers.

The rationale is obvious: AWS is eating everyone’s lunch, so now is the time to pile on. If AWS were not doing so well in the market, you wouldn’t see many of these partnerships — trust me.

What’s an enterprise cloud guy to do? Use these partnerships to your advantage. No matter what the motivation, they open up new paths to cloud computing success, both private and public. As everyone teams up to defeat AWS, the prices should fall and the breadth of the technology stacks should increase.

SOURCE
By David Linthicum | InfoWorld

AWS Cloud School – London May 2012

AWS Cloud School – London May 2012

View more presentations from Amazon Web Services

InfoWorld : Bringing the Cloud to the Data Center – On-Demand

Enterprises with growing data and multiple locations are facing challenges associated with managing the rapid growth of data and keeping employees connected. Do you need a solution that securely delivers read & write access to content shared across offices? If so, then you won’t want to miss this video about Nasuni’s Data Continuity Services. Nasuni delivers multi-site access to a shared storage repository in the cloud that is locally available at every office or location in your organization.

Moderator: Debra Bulkeley, Sr Managing Editor – IDG Enterprise

Featured Speakers: Chris Glew, Product Evangelist, Nasuni

Register here for Video link- Bringing the Cloud to the Data Center

Nasuni – How it Works : http://www.nasuni.com/how_it_works

Seeding Torrents with Amazon S3 and s3cmd on Ubuntu

Again a nice post by Eric Hammond . Hope its useful for some of you out there…

Amazon Web Services is such a huge, complex service with so many products and features that sometimes very simple but powerful features fall through the cracks when you’re reading the extensive documentation.

One of these features, which has been around for a very long time, is the ability to use AWS to seed (serve) downloadable files using the BitTorrent™ protocol. You don’t need to run EC2 instances and set up software. In fact, you don’t need to do anything except upload your files to S3 and make them publicly available.

Any file available for normal HTTP download in S3 is also available for download through a torrent. All you need to do is append the string ?torrent to the end of the URL and Amazon S3 takes care of the rest.

Steps

Let’s walk through uploading a file to S3 and accessing it with a torrent client using Ubuntu as our local system. This approach uses s3cmd to upload the file to S3, but any other S3 software can get the job done, too.

1. Install the useful s3cmd tool and set up a configuration file for it. This is a one time step:

   sudo apt-get install s3cmd s3cmd --configure 

   The configure phase will prompt for your AWS access key id and AWS secret access key. These are stored in $HOME/.s3cmd which you should protect. You can press [Enter] for the encryption password and GPG program. I prefer “Yes” for using the HTTPS protocol, especially if I am using s3cmd from outside of EC2.

2. Create an S3 bucket and upload the file with public access:

   bucket=YOURBUCKETNAME filename=FILETOUPLOAD basename=$(basename $filename) s3cmd mb s3://$bucket s3cmd put --acl-public $filename s3://$bucket/$basename 

3. Display the URLs which can be used to access the file through normal web download and through a torrent:

   cat <<EOM web: http://$bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/$basename torrent: http://$bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/$basename?torrent EOM 

Notes

1. The above process makes your file publicly available to anybody in the world. Don’t use this for anything you wish to keep private.
2. You will pay standard S3 network charges for all downloads from S3 including the initial torrent seeding. You do not pay for network transfers between torrent peers once folks are serving the file chunks to each other.
3. You cannot throttle the rate or frequency of downloads from S3. You can turn off access to prevent further downloads, but monitoring accesses and usage is not entirely real time.
4. If your file is not popular enough for other torrent peers to be actively serving it, then every person who downloads it will transfer the entire content from S3’s torrent servers.
5.  If people know what they are doing, they can easily remove “?torrent” and download the entire file direct from S3, perhaps resulting in a higher cost to you. So as a work-around just download the ?torrent URL, save the torrent file, and upload it back to S3 as a .torrent file. Share the torrent file itself, not the ?torrent URL. Since nobody will know the URL of the original file, they can only download it via the torrent.You don’t even need to share the .torrent file using S3.SOURCE

Uploading Known ssh Host Key in EC2 user-data Script

I have not tested this personally, but seems to be a correctly put by Eric Hammond . If you try, do let me know if you find any catchs. 🙂

The ssh protocol uses two different keys to keep you secure:

1. The user ssh key is the one we normally think of. This authenticates us to the remote host, proving that we are who we say we are and allowing us to log in.
2. The ssh host key gets less attention, but is also important. This authenticates the remote host to our local computer and proves that the ssh session is encrypted so that nobody can be listening in.

Every time you see a prompt like the following, ssh is checking the host key and asking you to make sure that your session is going to be encrypted securely.

The authenticity of host 'ec2-...' can't be established. ECDSA key fingerprint is ca:79:72:ea:23:94:5e:f5:f0:b8:c0:5a:17:8c:6f:a8. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? 

If you answer “yes” without verifying that the remote ssh host key fingerprint is the same, then you are basically saying:

I don’t need this ssh session encrypted. It’s fine for any man-in-the-middle to intercept the communication.

Ouch! (But a lot of people do this.)

Note: If you have a line like the following in your ssh config file, then you are automatically answering “yes” to this prompt for every ssh connection.

# DON'T DO THIS! StrictHostKeyChecking false 

Care about security

Since you do care about security and privacy, you want to verify that you are talking to the right server using encryption and that no man-in-the-middle can intercept your session.

There are a couple approaches you can take to check the fingerprint for a new Amazon EC2 instance. The first is to wait for the console output to be available from the instance, retrieve it, and verify that the ssh host key fingerprint in the console output is the same as the one which is being presented to you in the prompt.

Scott Moser has written a blog post describing how to verify ssh keys on EC2 instances. It’s worth reading so that you understand the principles and the official way to do this.

The rest of this article is going to present a different approach that lets you in to your new instance quickly and securely.

Passing ssh host key to new EC2 instance

Instead of letting the new EC2 instance generate its own ssh host key and waiting for it to communicate the fingerprint through the EC2 console output, we can generate the new ssh host key on our local system and pass it to the new instance.

Using this approach, we already know the public side of the ssh key so we don’t have to wait for it to become available through the console (which can take minutes).

Generate a new ssh host key for the new EC2 instance.

tmpdir=$(mktemp -d /tmp/ssh-host-key.XXXXXX) keyfile=$tmpdir/ssh_host_ecdsa_key ssh-keygen -q -t ecdsa -N "" -C "" -f $keyfile 

Create the user-data script that will set the ssh host key.

userdatafile=$tmpdir/set-ssh-host-key.user-data cat <<EOF >$userdatafile #!/bin/bash -xeu cat <<EOKEY >/etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key $(cat $keyfile) EOKEY cat <<EOKEY >/etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key.pub $(cat $keyfile.pub) EOKEY EOF 

Run an EC2 instance, say Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric, passing in the user-data script. Make a note of the new instance id.

ec2-run-instances --key $USER --user-data-file $userdatafile ami-4dad7424 instanceid=i-... 

Wait for the instance to get a public DNS name and make a note of it.

ec2-describe-instances $instanceid host=ec2-...compute-1.amazonaws.com 

Add new public ssh host key to our local ssh known_hosts after removing any leftover key (e.g., from previous EC2 instance at same IP address).

knownhosts=$HOME/.ssh/known_hosts ssh-keygen -R $host -f $knownhosts ssh-keygen -R $(dig +short $host) -f $knownhosts ( echo -n "$host "; cat $keyfile.pub echo -n "$(dig +short $host) "; cat $keyfile.pub ) >> $knownhosts 

When the instance starts running and the user-data script has executed, you can ssh in to the server without being prompted to verify the fingerprint

ssh ubuntu@$host 

Don’t forget to clean up and to terminate your test instance.

rm -rf $tmpdir ec2-terminate-instances $instanceid 

Caveat

There is one big drawback in the above sample implementation of this approach. We have placed secret information (the private ssh host key) into the EC2 user-data, which I generally recommend against.

Any user who can log in to the instance or who can cause the instance to request a URL and get the output, can retrieve the user-data. You might think this is unlikely to happen, but I’d rather avoid or minimize unnecessary risk.

In a production implementation of this approach, I would take steps like the following:

1. Upload the new ssh host key to S3 in a private object.
2. Generate an authenticated URL to the S3 object and have that URL expire in, say, 10 minutes.
3. In the user-data script, download the ssh host key with the authenticated, expiring S3 URL.

Now, there is a short window of exposure and you don’t have to worry about protecting the user-data after the URL has expired.

SOURCE

Cloud Infographic: The Cloud Wars – Private Vs Public | CloudTweaks.com – Cloud Computing Community

Cloud Infographic: The Cloud Wars – Private Vs Public | CloudTweaks.com – Cloud Computing Community.

Cloud computing is not an all-or-nothing option. In the past decade, the industry has matured to a point where there are almost a dozen different options to move your data and processes to the cloud. Two of the most discussed are Private and Public clouds.

Here is an infographic presenting a breakdown of the two different cloud models.