cloud on MaisonBisson

Inter-AZ cloud network performance

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 07:17:35 -0800

Archana Kesavan of ThousandEyes speaking at NANOG75 reports that network traffic between AZs within a single region is generally “reliable and consistent,” and that tested cloud providers offer a “robust regional backbone for [suitable for] redundant, multi-AZ architectures.

Bare metal clouds are hard

Wed, 27 Feb 2019 08:28:00 -0800

The problem, explains Eclypsium, is that a miscreant could rent a bare-metal server instance from a provider, then exploit a firmware-level vulnerability, such as one in UEFI or BMC code, to gain persistence on the machine, and the ability to covertly monitor every subsequent use of that server. In other words, injecting spyware into the server’s motherboard software, which runs below and out of sight of the host operating system and antivirus, so that future renters of the box will be secretly snooped on.

Indeed, the researchers found they could acquire, in the Softlayer cloud, a bare-metal server, modify the underlying BMC firmware, release the box for someone else to use, and then, by tracking the hardware serial number, wait to re-provision server to see if their firmware change was still intact. And it was. BMC is the Baseband Management Controller, the remote-controllable janitor of a server that has full access to the system.

Market risks and opportunities for Linux distro vendors

Thu, 14 Feb 2019 10:18:57 -0800

IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat got me thinking about how the market for commercially supported Linux distros is changing.

Kubesprawl

Wed, 13 Feb 2019 09:28:26 -0800

This leads to the emerging pattern of “many clusters” rather than “one big shared” cluster.

Claim chowder: cloud storage

Sat, 03 Feb 2018 13:38:27 -0700

Ten years ago Apple was still doing MacWorld Expo keynotes, and that year they introduced Time Capsule.

AWS regions, AZs, and VPCs, NICs, IPs, and performance

Tue, 05 Dec 2017 21:32:01 -0700

Jump to section: Availability zones and regions VPCs Elastic IPs and Elastic Network Interfaces Network performance Resources by scope Connectivity by scope Availability zones and regions AWS’ primary cloud is available in 15 regions, each with two to six availability zones, not including separately operated regions (with independent identity) for GovCloud and China.

Drivers and “standards”

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 14:20:48 -0700

For both network and block storage, AWS is doing significant work to develop and maintain drivers in a variety of guest OSs.

Hardware virtualization has moved to hardware

Wed, 29 Nov 2017 14:14:06 -0700

One of my takeaways from AWS’ bare metal announcements at re:Invent this week is that the compute, storage, and network aspects of hardware virtualization are now optimized and accelerated in hardware. AWS has moved beyond the limitations that constrained VM performance, and the work they’ve done applies both to their bare metal hardware and their latest VM instance types.