Microsoft Cloud Based Office 365

Operating System giant Microsoft releases a cloud based web application naming Office 365 in revenge of Search engine giant Google Inc Apps. I think there is a reason behind the number 365 because this office 365 application available all the days in a year. This online application will be very useful for small,medium scale business.Office 365 provides the online outlook,share point, word,spread sheet, power point and the documents can be saved in online. This application works under cloud computing technology and this application is going to be live on 28th of June 2011
Office 365 website : http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/online-software.aspx#fbid=51EtO3mMRiH
To know more http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/en-us/faq

Ubuntu 10.10 'Maverick Meerkat'

After long period i am posting this marvellous post
Ubuntu in action with new version 10.10 Maverick Meerkat :)
Some of the features are
1) For the 10.10 desktop edition, the GNOME desktop environment has been updated to the 2.31 version and the Evolution groupware suite is version 2.30, which is said the be much faster compared with the version the previous release, 10.04.


2)The Ubuntu Software Center gets an updated look and feel and the Ubuntu One cloud service is better integrated in the to the desktop integration with a new authentication process.


3)The new btrfs file system is an option during installation and the Maverick beta kernel has decommissioned support for the ia64 and Sparc architecture ports - a decision made by the Ubuntu Tech Board

and lot more features.....enjoy it on 10 October, 2010.

Five Key Benifits Of Cloud Computing

The term "cloud" is heavily used, but not often well defined. In this white paper, learn how cloud is defined and grouped by different components known as Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and Architecture-as-a-Service. Discover five key dimensions of cloud computing, including opportunities created by this technology and how it can help businesses make real decisions based on data.

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Ubuntu founder names 10.04 release

Lucid Lynx to help enterprises move into the cloud

The wraps are coming off the latest version of Ubuntu with creator, Mark Shuttleworth, announcing the name of the next release, Lucid Lynx.

Speaking via video to UbuCon in Atlanta, Shuttleworth said Ubuntu 10.04, which will the supersede 9.04 release, would be a long-term support (LTS) release with support for the desktop for 3 years and for the server for 5 years.

"It has been a very big year in the Ubuntu community and probably the biggest thing for us is the focus that is now starting to come to bear on our next release", he said. "It will effectively be the third LTS release in a row delivered on a two-year cadence."

Shuttleworth said it was testament to the open source community that the Ubuntu project was not only able to release the product on on a six-month cadence, but on a two-year major platform cycle for large organisations that need long term support and predictability for organisational planning.

Lucid Lynx will continue the close relationship with the Debian architecture and infrastructure, he said.

"We have had the opportunity to do some good behind the scenes support with Debian, which is the most important distribution to us. I hope over time that we can broaden that and elevate the art of free software."

The Lucid Lynx name is designed to bring together the aspirational characteristics of Ubuntu – Lucid for clarity and focus, and Lynx as a "thoughtful and considered predator".

On the desktop side, 10.04 will focus on delivering the best of GNOME 2.0. Subsequent releases will focus on the new technologies, architectures and experiences being developed as part of GNOME 3.0.

"On the server side, we’ll be taking the large scale, horizontal scalability, volume deployment, heritage of Debian and really try to push that into cloud computing," Shuttleworth said. "Making sure that 10.04 is a platform for anybody who is building a large scale infrastructure - for anybody who is trying to build the next Facebook, the next Google, the next eBay. Whether you want to start on (Amazon) EC2 and migrate to the managed cloud, Ubuntu 10.0.4 is going to be the platform."

White House Unveils Cloud Computing Initiative

The Obama administration has introduced a cloud computing policy that aims to lower infrastructure costs and reduce the environmental impact of government computing. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra says the plan is the administration's first formal effort to launch a broad system designed to leverage existing infrastructure and cut federal spending on information technology, particularly expensive data centers. Kundra says the government has built numerous, redundant data centers, which has resulted in a doubling of federal energy consumption between 2000 and 2006. Some aspects of the cloud computing policy already have been released, such as the new Apps.gov Web site, which is a clearinghouse of business, social media, productivity applications, and cloud IT services. The administration hopes the site will become a one-stop shop for many services that previously required extensive IT spending. The second phase will involve budget reform. For fiscal year 2010, the administration will be pushing cloud computing projects in the hope that many lightweight workflows can be moved into the cloud, and in fiscal 2011 the administration will be issuing guidance to agencies. The final phase will include policy planning and architecture that will involve centralized certifications, target architecture, and security, privacy, and procurement concerns. Kundra says the ultimate goal is to make it easy for agencies to procure the applications they need and to avoid having the government pay to build infrastructure that may be available for free.

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http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10353479-52.html

New Way to Attack the Cloud

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have found security holes in Amazon's EC2 cloud-computing service. The researchers were able to execute basic versions of side-channel attacks, in which a hacker looks at indirect information related to the computer to determine what is taking place on the machine. The researchers succeeded in pinpointing the physical servers used by programs running on the EC2 cloud, and then extracted small amounts of data from those programs. Previous research has demonstrated the vulnerability of side-channel attacks. In 2001, University of California, Berkeley researchers were able to extract password information from an encrypted SSH data stream by performing a statistical analysis of how keystrokes generated traffic on the network. By looking at the computer's memory cache, the UCSD and MIT researchers were able to obtain basic information about when other users on the same machine were using a keyboard to perform tasks such as accessing the computer using an SSH terminal. The researchers say that measuring the time between keystrokes enables them to determine what is being typed on the machine. To perform this attack, the researchers had to determine which EC2 machine was running the program they wanted to target, a difficult challenge as cloud computing is supposed to hide this information. However, by performing an analysis of DNS traffic and using a network-monitoring tool, the researchers developed a technique that could provide a 40 percent chance of placing their attack code on the same server as their target. Security experts say that side-channel techniques could lead to more serious problems for cloud computing.

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eyeOs

eyeOS is a free software web desktop following the cloud computing concept, written in mainly PHP, XML, and JavaScript. It acts as a platform for web applications written using the eyeOS Toolkit, and includes a desktop environment with 67 applications and system utilities. The eyeOS project is thought to build the free software alternative to the big Cloud Computing services, especially those which keep the data on their servers. With eyeOS the data is always kept on the local server.

http://wiki.eyeos.org

Steps to host appliaction in cloud

To host application in cloud computing
you upload your application to Azure using the Azure portal at:
https://lx.azure.microsoft.com/Cloud/Provisioning/Default.aspx

If you're wanting to put a SQL database back end in the cloud, you'll want to check out SQL Data Services. If you want to access your on premise SQL Server from the cloud you'd have to punch in the appropriate holes into your firewall to allow access (not something I think any DBA or network admin would be fond of doing).

You might want to check out the Windows Azure whitepaper from MS. It has alot of introductory type information on the services available as part of Azure Services: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/whitepaper.mspx

I've also posted several blog articles that walk through some basic topics: http://bstineman.spaces.live.com/?_c11_BlogPart_BlogPart=blogview&_c=BlogPart&partqs=cat%3dAzure%2520Services

Cloud computing can be broken down into 3 basic categories.
SaaS - software as a service (using a hosted product such as SalesForce.com or CRM Online)
PaaS - creating an application that is then deployed into a hosted environment (Windows Azure)
IaaS - a virtualized infrastructure hosted in the cloud (EC2 and to an extent Windows Azure)
When hosting an application in Azure, it needs to be built for Windows Azure. You can't simply build it as you would a traditional on-premise application and push it up to the cloud. This doesn't prevent you from pushing custom bits into Azure as you did with an on-premise but it does limit what can be pushed. In a nutshell, it seems that if you have to run an install to get require software on the computer, you won't be able to run it on Azure. However, if you just need to load some redistributables onto the box and they can reside in the application folder, that shouldn't prohibit it running.

Course as you'd expect, there are security limitations in place to help ensure that anything that gets loaded into your deployment don't compromise the Azure Fabric and possibly damage other applications running in the Windows Azure cloud.

5 Cool Cloud Computing Research Projects

The HotCloud conference on cloud computing in San Diego will showcase a number of research projects. One such project is a Trusted Cloud Computing Platform developed by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems that "enables Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon EC2 to provide a closed box execution environment that guarantees confidential execution of guest virtual machines (VMs)." The platform would guarantee customers that their data has not been interfered with by service providers while also allowing service providers to secure data even across many VMs. Meanwhile, University of Washington researchers are exploiting the fact that Web services and applications will be very closely situated to develop CloudViews, a common storage system designed "to facilitate collaboration through protected inter-service data sharing." University of Minnesota researchers have outlined a way to form nebulas from distributed voluntary resources that could provide greater scalability, more geographical dispersion of nodes, and lower cost than traditional managed clouds. Researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz, NetApp, and Pergamum Systems are considering the trade-offs between storing data and recalculating results as needed in an attempt to boost the efficiency of cloud computing. They write in a paper that "recomputation as a replacement for storage fits well into the holistic model of computing described by the cloud architecture. With its dynamically scalable and virtualized architecture, cloud computing aims to abstract away the details of underlying infrastructure. In both public and private clouds, the user is encouraged to think in terms of services, not structure."
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