InfoQ Homepage Cloud Computing Content on InfoQ
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Windows Domain to Amazon EC2 Single Sign-On Access Solutions
David Chappell, the Principal of Chappell & Associates, US, has written a whitepaper proposing several solutions for Single Sign-on (SSO) access to applications deployed on Amazon EC2 from a Windows domain. InfoQ explored these solutions to understand what the benefits and tradeoffs each one presented.
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Advice for Securing Data in Windows Azure
In a recent MSDN article entitled Crypto Services and Data Security in Windows Azure, Jonathan Wiggs provides advice on securing data stored and processed through Windows Azure. InfoQ explored the topic in more detail to understand some of the security ramifications which come with deploying an application to the cloud.
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A Step Toward Better Cloud Security: Searchable Encryption
In a whitepaper entitled Cryptographic Cloud Storage, Seny Kamara and Kristin Lauter from the Microsoft Research Cryptography Group, propose a "virtual private storage service" offered by public clouds using new cryptographic techniques.
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Is Amazon EC2 Oversubscribed and Suffering from Internal Network Latency?
There have been various reports from the community of Amazon EC2 users, that their instances are suffering poor performance, as the result of high internal network latency. This has led to speculations that Amazon's Cloud might be getting oversubscribed.
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Azure Feature Voting Results
While voting is still open, there are some clear front-runners for the most needed features. The vote is being run by Mike Wickstrand, Senior Director of Product Planning for Windows Azure, and hosted at www.MyGreatWindowsAzureIdea.com. Of the top 6 items, there are four requests for making Azure cheaper in various scenarios, a request for .NET 4.0 support, and the need for sending email.
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Azure Storage Options
The Windows Azure Platform offers a wide range of storage options for unstructured, structured, and message style data. Deciding which option to use can be quite daunting, especially with the limitations of this new technology being so uncertain. This piece enumerates the storage options and discusses their basic capabilities and limitations relative to the other options available on the platform.
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Amazon RDS: MySQL Database as a Cloud Service
Amazon recently added a new MySQL database offering to their Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform named Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). InfoQ explores the benefits and shortcomings of this new service, how it compares to running a local MySQL database, maintenance and replication, the 4-hour weekly downtime window requirement, availability zones, and future plans.
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Free and Reduced Price Windows Azure Packages
In order to spur adoption, Microsoft is offering free and reduced price packages for Windows Azure. All of these packages are available from February 1st thru June 30th, with January free to everyone using the North America data centers.
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Ruby on Rails Is Compatible with Microsoft Azure
Microsoft has opened Windows Azure to many other non-MS technologies in an attempt to lure companies and developers to deploy their applications on the Azure cloud rather than on their competition’s. One such technology is Ruby on Rails.
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Easily Accessing Azure Cloud Services with AppFabric
Microsoft Windows Azure Platform AppFabric is a set of technologies helpful to connect on-premises applications with Azure cloud services and resources and eases interoperability between users belonging to different domains. The main components are the Service Bus and the Access Control Service.
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Performance Measured by the Penny
Cloud computing is a game changer for developers. Not because it requires a new architectural model, that is driven as much by fads and fashion as it is by actual hardware requirements. Nor is it the seemingly endless capacity with near-perfect scalability that the cloud is promising. The game changer is how poorly performing code now has a real price in hard currency.
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WordPress has Gone Live on Windows Azure
On Tuesday Microsoft announced that Windows Azure would support the LAMP stack, well perhaps “the -AMP stack” is a better term. With Linux out of the picture, Microsoft is courting developers building on top of Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python including the users of the wildly popular WordPress blogging software.
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Amazon Helps .NET Developers Program for Its Clouds
Amazon has released the AWS SDK for .NET, a set of libraries, code samples and documentation for .NET developers creating applications that use Amazon’s cloud.
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Yahoo! Offers Its Traffic Server to Apache
Shelton Shugar, SVP Cloud Computing at Yahoo!, has announced the donation of its Traffic Server (TS), an HTTP cache server, to Apache during his keynote at Cloud Computing Conference.
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Amazon Offers MySQL as a Service
Amazon has announced a new service, Amazon Relational Database Service or RDS, a solution for creating and accessing a relational database in the cloud. The hosted database is MySQL 5.1 and the announcement precedes PDC 2009 by 3 weeks when Microsoft will announce the availability of SQL Azure, a cloud solution based on its relational DB.