Thursday 30 April 2009

The good, the bad and the ugly - Infosecurity Europe

Quick summary of Infosecurity Europe 2009, based on a bit more than a day I've spent there...

THE GOOD

There is always some good stuff at the conferences like Infosecurity. This one is no exception!

  • EDR was more than happy to show us how their data destruction really works

... and after that you are left with a disk... almost like new :-) Thanks for the demo!


This would be all good so far... so let's move on...

Wednesday 1 April 2009

DIY cloud computing - it is easier than you may think!

It seems that the weather forecast for the Internet is a bit "cloudy" nowadays and it will stay this way at least for some time. The "clouds" are a very hot topic right now and more and more companies try to get on the bandwagon as soon as possible - some just run tests while others go into production. You can run "your own" cloud environment for peanuts, the costs are so marginal that it made me laugh when I got my last bill from Amazon AWS, but nevertheless it doesn't always calculate to run your stuff on commercial cloud, especially if you have hardware at hand. The DIY approach is easier than it seems to be. Here is how I've built my own, small "cloud" to solve a problem I was facing at work. It's not a rocket science, it's not full blown management system with hundreds of machines... it works for me and I believe anyone can build similar system - hopefully much better than I did with mine.

Staying away from terminology like HPC/cluster/cloud/grid and meanings of those I use the term "cloud" because I think it's the closest to what I've got now in my prototype - it's still work in progress and it gets even more "cloudy" or change shape otherwise. There won't be any code this time - maybe when I finish it properly and have some proper performance stats - so far it's just a running and usable PoC I describe here :-)