The 6 layers of the Cloud Computing Stack

Stateless Computing

By G C Network | August 15, 2008

A few days ago I read a review of Merrill Lynch’s Jeffrey Birnbaum LinuxWorld keynote on stateless computing. “With stateless computing, users’ settings and data are automatically saved to the…

Cloud Services

By G C Network | August 14, 2008

38% of 456 business technology professionals in a Information Week survey indicated that they currently use or will consider using services from a cloud provider. This seems much betterthan the…

Amazon, Elastra and the New Enterprise Data Center

By G C Network | August 13, 2008

Last week Amazon made an investment into Elastra. Some see this as Amazon’s enterprise play. Others see it as move towards the viability of private clouds. I see it as…

Microsoft Midori

By G C Network | August 12, 2008

Last week word got out that Microsoft’s new research project codenamed Midori. According to Information Week “the Midori system is being called Microsoft’s first cloud-based OS, and it could one…

Dell Trademarking Cloud Computing

By G C Network | August 11, 2008

There has been quite a bit of chatter lately over Dell’s attempt to patent “cloud computing”. Last week, the US Patent and Trade Office put an end to those aspirations…

Rob Enderle Cautions on Cloud Computing

By G C Network | August 8, 2008

Words of caution from Rob Enderle in “The Real Truth and Technology and IT”: “The key to success in the cloud will be keeping solutions simple, plus understanding and mitigating…

3 Important Point for Federal Government Cloud Computing

By G C Network | August 7, 2008

Point 1: In May, Verizon and AT&T were awarded a DHS task order for just under $1B to provide telecommunications services to the department. Verizon won the lead provider’s spot…

A Cloud Methodology

By G C Network | August 7, 2008

Although this was published in June, I just saw it and felt it was to good not to repeat: A Methodology for Cloud Computing Architecture Peel off the applications individually,…

IBM Invests Nearly $400M on Cloud Computing Centers

By G C Network | August 6, 2008

In a press release last week, IBM says that it will spend $360 million to build its most sophisticated, state-of-the-art data center at its facility in Research Triangle Park (RTP),…

Cloud Computing and the NCOIC

By G C Network | August 5, 2008

According to their website, The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) has scheduled a session on cloud computing at their upcoming plenary session in September. In case you haven’t heard…

From Sam Johnston’s Taxonomy post

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G C Network

2 Comments

  1. Randall on October 7, 2008 at 10:35 am

    You don’t mention where security fits in this stack. I know security is important at every level and it is there at every level now, but really there should be a single source of secure control of access to resources.

    That’s something big we need to work out. How can I have one account, the account I use to log into my cloud application and I can use that application with any other layer of stack or in combination with them without having to know that amazon requires these credentials and nirvanix requires another set.

    The end user shouldn’t care about these things, it should be handled at the platform level, but from my perspective there is no robust security model for the cloud, not yet.

    Any ideas what we might see fill this gap?



  2. Sam Johnston on March 4, 2009 at 10:52 pm

    Actually security is something that I do think about as a CISSP, but having looked at the various solutions it was clear that they permiated every layer of the stack. The resources themselves are secured by various mechanisms (AWS request signing for example) and from the user point of view you have OpenID and OAuth at the services layer. Even on the clients we don’t want cloud apps interfering with each other and you can see that browsers like chrome go to great lengths to prevent this.

    So yes it’s a valid point, but not one that wasn’t well considered.

    Cheers,

    Sam