The 6 layers of the Cloud Computing Stack

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