Blogging Techstacks

Red Hat OpenShift - New Free and Paid PaaS Cloud Services

Red Hat has launched Red Hat OpenShift (RHOS), a suite of cloud-based PaaS products.  Currently in developer preview, there are three different products, two of which are available now:

• OpenShift Express - A free, cloud-based platform allowing you to deploy your PHP, Ruby, or Python (No Perl?) applications in a shared, multi-tenant model.  
• OpenShift Flex - Geared towards higher end PHP and Java Enterprise Edition applications, OpenShift Flex follows more of a dedicated-hosting model.  It provides the developer with shell access and supports performance monitoring, versioning, auto-scaling, and supports jboss and tomcat.  This is not a free product.
• OpenShift Power - Coming soon, this product allows you to deploy your custom-written Linux-based apps, both web-based and non-web based.  Quoting information taken directly from the Red Hat site, OpenShift Power "has an image configuration system, a scripting template system, an image library for re-using template, and a way to dynamically define multi-VM architectures that span clouds".

I want to stress a few things here.  OpenShift is presently targeting developers—the web site home page even stresses that "OpenShift is for developers who love to build on open source, but don't need the hassle of building and maintaining infrastructure."  There is no support yet for OpenShift infrastructure other than forums and Red Hat does not provide an SLA (yet) on these products.  In other words, use it now at your own risk.

Links - Threats to Cloud Computing

Today, I stumbled across a few links to various articles talking about the latest batch of threats to cloud computing, which I thought others might find interesting as well.  The first post is from the privatecloud site, which appears to be sponsored by EMC, Cisco, and VMWare titled: 5 Overlooked Threats to Cloud Computing.  It is a repost from a DataMation article that appeared the same day, which is much more ad-friendly!  ( Please note that storage, networking, and virtualization are not noted as threats. :)

Over at the CCSK Guide, "Top Threats to Cloud Computing" summarizes a recently published pdf whitepaper with the same title from the Cloud Security Alliance.  The blog posts summarizes, the whitepaper goes a little more in-depth.