One of the tracks at Catalyst this year focussed on Cloud Computing, and included sessions from Burton Group analysts, customers and cloud service providers. Burton Group made a point of distinguishing the different types of cloud services that are currently available:
- Hardware / Infrastructure as a Service
- Services that allow you to run your OS and software on top of virtualized servers, storage and networking: Amazon (EC2, S3, etc.), Rackspace Cloud, various Virtual Private Server vendors, etc.
- Platform as a Service
- Services that provide a development platform, where you have no view into the OS or infrastructure and are bound to a particular application development environment: Salesforce’s force.com, Google AppEngine, EngineYard, etc.
- Application / Software as a Service
- Services that provide applications directly to users, sometimes with opportunities to integrate with in-house apps and services (e.g. authentication) – Google Apps, Zoho, Microsoft Office Live, Salesforce, Basecamp
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I took a quick look at using SSL with MySQL, and it turns out to be reasonably simple to enable SSL for transport level encryption, while still using username and password for authentication. Read on for some links to useful articles for MySQL, Java, Perl, Ruby on Rails and some sad news about PHP.
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In the beginning was The Mainframe. It came from IBM, as did all the peripherals… at an outrageous price. Along came an upstart called EMC who could sell us disk to work with The Mainframe. Not only did the EMC disk cost less than IBM’s, it could also be connected to our Unix systems. And thusly, did the EMC arrays come forth and multiply, until they numbered 13.
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Bob Blakley from the Burton Group presented some of the content of his soon-to-be-released Relationship Layer paper at both IIW 2008a and Data Sharing Summit 2. Phil Windley has a longer writeup on his blog, but the gist of the paper is that “identity” only has meaning within a relationship.
Several people have asked for the slides (PDF, 5MB) from my COmanage session at the last I2 member meeting. They’re not slidumentation or docu-point, so I’m not sure how useful they’ll really be to others. Contact me if you want the original Keynote slides.
Sun has come to the conclusion that they needed a RESTful alternative to ID-WSF, and have looked at OAuth + REST.
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After the presentation, lunch, then onto discussions of various permissions management issues.
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Representatives from Washington, Stanford, Penn State and MIT met at MIT to discuss their permissions management systems and Internet2’s Signet system on May 2, 2008.
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We often run multiple applications on a single server; if the apps all need the same set of attributes they can be treated as a single Service Provider (SP). Sometimes the applications need to be separated, and the obvious, easy way to do this, other than running them on separate servers, or to add a separate IP address, SSL certificate and Apache virtual host for each application. However, a Shibboleth SP can be configured with multiple providerIds, using a single certificate.
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