Today Amazon announced the release of the “micro” instances.

From Amazon:

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of Micro instances for Amazon EC2, a new, low cost instance type designed for lower throughput applications and web sites.

Micro instances provide 613 MB of memory and support 32-bit and 64-bit platforms on both Linux and Windows. Micro instance pricing for On-Demand instances starts at $0.02 per hour for Linux and $0.03 per hour for Windows.

A very interesting attempt by Amazon to lower the bar for access to smaller companies and organizations. Not much of a security angle here with the minor observation that this would be great for building a DDoS botnet.

Just saying.

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(Image used under CC from Art of Precision)

Intel raised the bar in the processing game when this Tuesday they announced the release of the first 32nm processors. The big selling point here, according to the vendor, is the security aspects.

From The Taiwan Economic Times:

According to world`s No.1 chipmaker, the new processors are the industry`s first 32nm enterprise-grade devices integrating security capabilities that enhance data integrity and server virtualization as well as first six-core embedded computing processors. New structures enable the processors to deliver up to 60% greater performance than the 45nm Intel Xeon 5500 cousins, allowing data centers to replace 15 single-core servers with only one Xeon 5600-driven server and achieve a return on their investment in as little as five months.

The big selling points here being cloud computing and the financial sector. The real rub here will be how it will stand up against Joanna Rutkowska this time. Last time this is what happened (.pdf).

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(Image used under CC from Josh Bancroft)

Originally posted on Liquidmatrix Security Digest

There are times when cloud computing must seem like a pretty sweet option. I would imagine that the folks at WordPress were pondering something to that effect today. Earlier today they had an outage that lasted 110 minutes. Their worst outage in 4 years apparently.

From WordPress.com

What Happened: We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago. All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldn’t serve it.

I imagine that a LOT of coffee was downed while they scrambled to fix the outage. Change control is there for a reason. Which can only mean that as soon as the dust settles that someone will be looking for a new job. And that single point of failure will surely haunt them.

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(Image used under CC from bitzcelt)

Here is an article that appeared in the San Francisco Gate today. It provides a list of considerations for private cloud deployments.

From SF Gate:

Virtualization is understood as one of the key building blocks for private clouds. As a dynamic technology that enables IT organizations to reinvent how they think about management, it has the potential to make some things easier or make all things harder. Silo buying, heterogeneity, politics, poor integrations, and immature management tools can inhibit virtualization’s full value.

For the full list, read on.

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(Image used under CC from Globetoppers)