While we don’t usually review books on this blog, the Manga Guide to Databases deserves some serious attention for LongJump users. Those who are just getting started with relational database design and data modeling will find this guide to be entertaining and extremely comprehensive. And even the most seasoned DB gurus can appreciate just how accessible this guide is. Some of our LongJump engineers are already looking to buy copies for their kids.

Of course this book focuses on very bare bones database development, covering everything from entity-relationship diagramming to database security to data sharing and scalability issues (much of which LongJump’s Platform-as-a-Service handles natively without having to write SQL or having to architect a database infrastructure). Still, the courseware provides real “fantasy” world examples complete with theory and exercises, and it does so with humor and clarity.

In fact, this unique approach to learning definitely puts the fun back in the fundamentals. Here’s hoping they develop a Manga Guide to REST Web Services!

Technorati Tags: database, manga, rdbms, relational data, sql

Adoption of cloud based services is clearly on the up. Further to this, recent news from V3.co.uk reports on new figures from Gartner that found that worldwide software-as-a-service (SaaS) revenues in the enterprise application software market will surpass $8.5bn (£5.6bn)...

Fidelity Growth Partners Europe Leads New Round

GoodData today announced that it has closed Series A funding, adding $6.5 million in new capital, in addition to the $5 million raised in seed funding in 2009. This funding round was led by new investor Fidelity Growth Partners Europe and General Catalyst Partners, and includes participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Windcrest Partners.

GoodData provides an on-demand business intelligence service, delivering operational dashboards, advanced reporting and data warehousing at a fraction of the cost and complexity of other approaches. Through partnerships with SaaS providers and an active developer network, GoodData powers over 100,000 reports and 5,000 dashboards each month, all on a true multi-tenant cloud-based BI platform as a service (PaaS).

“GoodData has the right recipe to disrupt the multi-billion dollar BI market,” said Simon Clark, Partner at Fidelity Growth Partners Europe. “GoodData combines game-changing technology with an innovative go-to-market approach that’s too good to pass up.”

Key Company Highlights:

• November 2009: Introduced commercial SaaS applications for self-service dashboards and operational reporting across sales, marketing and customer support
• December 2009: Won 2009 Amazon Web Services startup challenge, beating over 1,000 companies building their business on the cloud using AWS
• June 2010: Opened up a complete BI Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), giving technical enablers open APIs and freely available developer tools to build their own BI apps
• July 2010: Launched GoodData for Zendesk, a powered by GoodData offering providing free dashboards and advanced analytics for all Zendesk Plus+ customers

“I founded GoodData to break the BI stranglehold,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData Founder and CEO. “This new funding allows us to continue building out our BI PaaS, and to leverage the unfair economics of the cloud to further disrupt the BI market.”

About GoodData
GoodData is the first company to offer a complete business intelligence platform-as-a-service (BI PaaS), providing our customers and partners operational dashboards, advanced reporting and data warehousing at a fraction of the cost and complexity of other approaches. GoodData is headquartered in San Francisco and located in the cloud at www.gooddata.com.

About Fidelity Growth Partners Europe
Fidelity Growth Partners Europe is a venture and growth capital investor which backs entrepreneurial companies in the IT and clean technology sectors across Europe. FGPE supports portfolio companies as they accelerate their growth with funding, team building,  partnerships and access to its global network.  Building on Fidelity’s 40 year heritage of venture investing, the firm has established a significant presence in Europe and invested in many of the leading European technology companies including Curam, Qumas, Newbay, Seatwave, Neverfail and Asset Control.  In January 2010, FGPE raised a new £100 million fund dedicated to backing European technology companies.

About General Catalyst Partners
General Catalyst Partners is a venture capital firm that invests in exceptional entrepreneurs who are building the technology-based companies that will lead innovation and transform industries. Founded in 2000, General Catalyst Partners leverages its principals’ extensive operational, business development and technological expertise to provide portfolio companies with a catalyst for success through business-building and partnership development assistance. General Catalyst is headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. For more information, please visit: http://www.generalcatalyst.com.

As Cloudant's ops guy and "utility infielder" I (@williamsjoe) will be speaking at the Surge conference in September. Surge is a conference presented by OmitTI that focuses on infrastructure and web operations. As such I will be discussing how we have built Cloudant's database platform on top of Amazon's EC2. The conference will include keynotes from the always excellent John Allspaw (of Flickr and Etsy fame) and Theo Schlossnagle (OmniTI).

 

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By Ellen Rubin

As IT organizations move forward with their virtualization initiatives, consolidating operations and shrinking provisioning times, the cloud has come along as an even more compelling option. In the cloud, companies can build capacity on-demand without having to own or manage the computing infrastructure. As companies review their application portfolios, they’ve started to realize that many of their not-yet-virtualized apps could easily be run in the cloud. In particular, applications that are characterized by spikey, cyclical, or seasonal usage could benefit the most from the cloud’s economics and scalability — but a significant percentage aren’t even getting the benefits of virtualization.

So what’s the delay in going “P2V” (physical to virtual)? As with the cloud, virtualization has typically percolated from the bottom up. In many cases it crept into organizations, led by developers and technology evangelists who recognized the efficiency and cost advantages of virtualization and simply started using it. While many enterprise customers have started expanding their virtual footprints it can be a long and complex process. Although technically it’s quite easy to virtualize an application, using a number of well-known P2V tools such as VMWare Converter from VMware or Platespin (now owned by Novell), the harder part of the process is often agreeing which applications to virtualize and understanding the inter-dependencies between these apps and other data center services.

As corporate IT has slowly adopted virtualization as a strategic imperative, the cloud has come along with paradigm-changing flexibility and elasticity. We’re now seeing enterprise customers and prospects ask what they can do with applications that aren’t yet virtualized and are still sitting on dedicated servers, recognizing that the cloud is likely to be their ultimate home. Thus we’re seeing the emergence of a new model — “P2C” (physical to cloud), with virtualization in the data center becoming a stepping stone to the ultimate destination of the cloud. As discussed in a previous blog, the cloud has become a catalyst that is prompting companies to broaden their virtualization efforts.

Customers and prospects have told us that the P2C model is far preferable to simply performing a virtualization project in a vacuum and figuring out later which applications really belong in the cloud and how to get them there. In contrast, P2C is all about planning for the cloud from the outset, starting with virtualization and moving to the cloud as a natural progression. The P2C approach can also lead enterprises to alter their virtualization strategy compared to pure P2V. In some cases, they may want to use the cloud a temporary home for applications that need to migrate between data centers, to support satellite offices or in the case of an acquisition. In other cases, they may keep the application permanently in the cloud and be able to budget for far fewer internal resources.

Thus, we encourage customers to consider P2C as a valuable strategy, since for many applications, the cloud will deliver far greater self-service and on-demand computing power than available internally. By planning for this ultimate goal and designing their infrastructure accordingly, customers can also potentially save a great deal of time and money. Ultimately, a single integrated environment will span the virtualized data center and multiple clouds, using the same tools and providing the same simplicity of experience. CloudSwitch is working with our customers and partners to make it easy to use the cloud, regardless of the starting point.

It’s been great to see such good traction with the media around our appointment by STA Travel. We have started working with the company to provide their users with a much faster and highly accessible website. Given that STA Travel...

Today we proudly announced that Deanne Harper, senior manager of Speech University at Nuance Communications, and our very own Sundar Raghavan, chief product and marketing officer at Skytap, will present at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference on July 28, 2010 in San Diego, CA. Both Harper and Raghavan will discuss real world applications for the cloud that can be used to accelerate business productivity, and share practical tips for companies to move to the cloud successfully. You can read the full press release here.

My previous trips to China, India, Japan, London have been super productive. I get a chance to meet tons of new people, make a lot of friends and talk about something that I am truly passionate about: Cloud Architectures and Amazon Web Services Cloud.

Next month, I will be in Brazil and traveling to 3 main cities to keynote and present at different conferences and user groups. My complete plan is as follows:

Aug 6 - Aug 11, 2010 in Sao Paulo:

• Keynote at iMasters Pro's Ecommerce Forum Brazil 2010
• Presentation at the Cloud Computing Summit 2010 - Organized by Tecla

Aug 12 - Aug 16, 2010 in Rio De Janero:

• Meeting Customers and Open for meetings

Aug 17 - Aug 21, 2010 in Brasilia:

• Keynote at CONSEGI 2010 - Third International Congress of Free and Electronic Government
• General session on Architecting for the cloud : Best Practices and Design Patterns
• Getting Started with Amazon Web Services - Hands-on Workshop

If you are in Brazil and passionate about cloud computing, I would like to meet you. If you are an aspiring cloud developer or architect, system integrator trying to win a local SaaS contract or an ISV trying to build a cloud strategy around your product, send me an email at evangelists [[at]] amazon [[dot]] com to schedule a meeting. I would love to exchange ideas, learn more about the local market and discuss the future. If you are a leader of a local user group and would like us to present to your group, please contact me in advance.

-- Jinesh

Today, Objectivity, a leader in distributed, scalable data management technology, delivered a press release about InfiniteGraph, a new distributed graph database product which is now available on GoGrid.

About Objectivity & InfiniteGraph

Objectivity, Inc., the leader in distributed, scalable data management technology, formed the InfiniteGraph business unit in 2010. The team was tasked with creating a product to meet a global need to obtain real-time answers from deep analysis of very large volumes of complex data.

The InfiniteGraph team has developed a solution that gives organizations significant technical cost savings and time-to-market advantages, in developing advanced and large-scale social networking, business intelligence, scientific research and national security systems across highly distributed environments. InfiniteGraph is unique among other products in the marketplace, providing a high-performance, distributed graph database with virtually unlimited scalability.

The InfiniteGraph graph database leverages enterprise-proven technology that supports the highest graph computing requirements, helping partners and customers to find and utilize the valuable connections and multi-dimensional relationships that exist within their data.

InfiniteGraph on the GoGrid Exchange

InfiniteGraph is the Distributed Graph Database for the Cloud. It supports the advanced requirements of web-scale systems and beyond, due to its unique distributed architecture and virtually unlimited scalability. InfiniteGraph’s massively parallel processing capabilities also help applications achieve near linear performance gains with every compute node. These features make InfiniteGraph the ideal solution for handling big data and graph requirements in highly connected but distributed platforms, enterprise and government infrastructures. For more information, please visit: http://www.infinitegraph.com/product/

Currently InfiniteGraph is available within GoGrid as 4 images, specifically:

• RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (32-bit)
• RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (64-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 (32-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 (64-bit)

Also, Objectivity announced a new program called “The InfiniteGraph Startup Program” which is free for qualified startups (see here for more details). Apart from the standard GoGrid hosting costs, qualified startups can use InfiniteGraph for FREE.

Objectivity & InfiniteGraph Press Release

The following Press Release was sent out today by Objectivity and is available online as well:

InfiniteGraph and GoGrid to Enable Large-Scale Graph Data Processing and Discovery, Free for Qualified Startups The program will allow developers to build complex data analytics systems on virtually unlimited infrastructure, at no extra cost.

Sunnyvale, CA (Vocus) July 26, 2010

InfiniteGraph, a new, distributed graph database product that enables large-scale graph processing, data analytics and discovery, is being made available through GoGrid, a leading Cloud Infrastructure Hosting provider. The InfiniteGraph business unit of Objectivity, Inc. is working with GoGrid to offer the technology for free to developers and solution providers seeking to leverage cloud infrastructures. InfiniteGraph is the only solution of its kind to be made available on GoGrid or any cloud computing platform.

The InfiniteGraph Startup Program, free for qualified startups, will allow developers to build highly scalable and distributed systems and services around social networking, business intelligence, scientific research and more, at no cost beyond GoGrid’s standard platform usage rates. The InfiniteGraph distributed graph database product is currently in beta, and version 1.0 will be generally available at the end of July; the InfiniteGraph Startup Program on GoGrid will be launched shortly thereafter. Developers already have access to the beta software, and can get more information by visiting www.InfiniteGraph.com/GoGrid.

About GoGrid

GoGrid is a Global Leader in Cloud & Hybrid Infrastructure hosting. GoGrid enables sysadmins, developers, and IT professionals to create, deploy, and control free f5 load balanced cloud infrastructures and complex hosted virtual server networks with full root access/administrative server control. GoGrid physical and virtual server instances maintain industry standard specifications with no requirement to learn proprietary standards. Deploying GoGrid infrastructure takes minutes via a web control panel or GoGrid’s API. GoGrid gives users the control of a familiar datacenter environment with the flexibility and immediate scalability of the cloud. For more information, please visit: http://www.GoGrid.com.

About InfiniteGraph

InfiniteGraph’s uniquely distributed graph database solution enables commercial, enterprise, government and other organizations to discover complex relationships in their vast and highly distributed data, with significant time-to-market advantages and technical cost savings.

About Objectivity, Inc.

Objectivity, Inc. is the leader in distributed, scalable data management technology. The company’s patented distributed data engine and persistent object store is the enabling technology within many markets, powering some of the most complex applications and mission critical systems used in commercial, enterprise, government and research organizations today. Objectivity, Inc. is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, USA. Please contact them online or call (408) 992-7100 for more information.

Objectivity, Objectivity, Inc., Objectivity/DB and InfiniteGraph are trademarks of Objectivity, Inc.. All other company, organization, product or alliance names mentioned herein remain the property of their respective owners.

###

Please be sure to visit the GoGrid Exchange for other solutions that include: Software & Applications, Development & Testing, Disaster Recovery & Backup, Cloud Management, and Security Monitoring & Reporting.

How big is the opportunity for cloud computing? A question asked at pretty well every IT conference these days. Whatever the number, it's a big one. Let's break down the opportunity by the numbers available today.

By 2011 Merrill Lynch says the cloud computing market will reach $160 billion.

The number of physical servers in the World today: 50 million.

By 2013, approximately 60 percent of server workloads will be virtualized

By 2013 10 percent of the total number of physical servers sold will be virtualized with an average of 10 VM's per physical server sold.

At 10 VM's per physical host that means about 80-100 million virtual machines are being created per year or 273,972 per day or 11,375 per hour.

50 percent of the 8 million servers sold every year end up in data centers, according to a BusinessWeek report

The data centers of the dot-com era consumed 1 or 2 megawatts. Today data center facilities require 20 megawatts are common, - 10 times as much as a decade ago.

Google currently controls 2% of all servers or about 1 million servers with it saying it plans to have upwards of 10 million servers ( 107 machines) in the next 10 years.

98% of the market is controlled by everyone else.

Hosting / Data center providers by top 5 regions around the world: 33,157

Top 5 break down
USA: 23,656
Canada: 2,740
United Kingdom: 2,660
Germany: 2,371
Netherlands: 1,730.

According to IDC, the market for private enterprise "Cloud servers will grow from an $8.4 billion opportunity in 2010, representing over 600,000 units, to a $12.6 billion market in 2014, with over 1.3 million units.

Market opporunity based purly on server count. $160 billion dollars divided by 50 million servers = $3,200 per server.

The amount of digital information increased by 73 percent in 2008 to an estimated 487 billion gigabytes, according to IDC.

World Population 2009: 6,767,805,208
Internet Users 2000: 360,985,492
Internet Users 2009: 1,802,330,457
Overall Internet User Growth: 399.3%
Fastest Growth Markets (Last 10 years) - Africa +1,809.8%, Middle East, +1,675%, Latin America +934.5%, Asia +568.8%
Slowest Growth Markets - North America +140.1%

Cloud value by world population: $23.64 per person
Cloud value by Global Internet population: $88.77 per person

-- Update --
Netcraft Finds 365,000 Web Sites on EC2

June 4th 2010
IBM says The Cloud cuts IT labor costs by up to 50%, improves capital utilization by 75%

July 1st 2010
IDC estimates that sales of public cloud services will grow at a 25 percent annual clip. The annual growth rate for typical IT projects, conversely, is 5 percent.

July 26 - 2010
SaaS Revenue to Grow Five Times Faster Than Traditional Packaged Software Through 2014, IDC Finds

• By 2012, IDC expects that less than 15% of net-new software firms coming to market will ship a packaged product (on CD). By 2014, about 34% of all new business software purchases will be consumed via SaaS, and SaaS delivery will constitute about 14.5% of worldwide software spending across all primary markets.
  
  
• By 2012, nearly 85% of net-new software firms coming to market will be built around SaaS service composition and delivery; by 2014, about 65% of new products from established ISVs will be delivered as SaaS services.
  
  
• SaaS-derived revenue will account for nearly 26% of net new growth in the software market in 2014.
  
  
• Traditional packaged software and perpetual license revenue are in decline and IDC predicts that a software industry shift toward subscription models will result in a nearly $7 billion decline in worldwide license revenue in 2010. As a result, a permanent change in software licensing regime will occur.
  
  
• SaaS segment mix will shift toward infrastructure and application development and deployment/PaaS, and away from U.S. dominance. IDC expects that by 2014, applications will account for just over half of market revenue. This shift will happen in part as a result of increasing IT cloud spending by enterprise IT groups and commercial cloud services providers (cloud SPs) relative to end-user spending

-- Conclusions --

Based on these numbers, a few things are clear. First server virtualization has lowered the capital expenditure required for deploying applications, but the operational costs have gone up significantly more than the capital cost savings making the operational long tail the costliest part of running servers.

Although Google controls 2 percent of the global supply of servers, the remaining 98 percent is where the real opportunities are both in private enterprise data centers as well as in 40,000+ public hosting companies.

This year 80-100 million virtual machine will be created, the traditional management approaches to infrastructure will break. Infrastructure automation is becoming a central part of any model data center. Providing infrastructure as a service will not be a nice to have but will be a requirement. Hosters, Enterprises and small business will need to start running existing servers in a cloud context or face in-efficiency which may limit potential growth.

Surging demand for data and information creation will force a migration to both public and private clouds specially in emerging markets such as Africa and Latin America.

Lastly, there is a tonne of money to be made.
Announcing The Enomaly Cloud Service Provider Edition | Twitter Me | Get Linkedin | Contact Reuven | Disclosure Policy

With the launch of the new GoGrid website and GoGrid 3.0, we also spent some time on a new calculator to help you estimate your costs of running your infrastructure on GoGrid. The calculator, just like GoGrid, is extremely easy to use and can definitely help you plan out your infrastructure in the GoGrid cloud.

Features of the calculator include:

• The ability to add numerous configurations of Cloud Servers (RAM/Hours Deployed/# of servers with that configuration)
• Add Load Balancing
• Add Cloud Storage
• Configure Inbound and Outbound monthly transfer
• Plan recommendations based on your configuration
• Estimated total monthly cost

So, for example, below is the following configuration:

• 2 – 2GB servers running for 30 days (720 hours)
• 2 – 4GB servers running for 30 days (720 hours)
• Load balancer –> it’s FREE
• 24 GB of Cloud Storage –> first 10 GBs are free so the charge is for 14 GB/Month @ $0.15/GB/mo
• 20 GB/mo Outbound Data Transfer ($0.29/GB/mo)
• Inbound data transfer –> it’s FREE

Note how a different Memory Plan is suggested based on my configuration:

If you add more Outbound Data Transfer to your account, the calculator will suggest a plan there as well. For example, changed the amount of Outbound data transfer to 6600 GB/mo, the calculator suggests the “Transfer 3.6 TB” pre-paid plan as a better alternative:

It’s pretty easy to play with different scenarios to help you project your GoGrid Infrastructure costs. Again, the GoGrid Pricing Calculator is located here: http://www.gogrid.com/cloud-hosting/cloud-hosting-pricing-calculator.php

What do you think? Is it helpful? Let us know any comments or suggestions on how to improve on it.

Security Advisories Fixed in Firefox 3.6.8:

MFSA 2010-48 Dangling pointer crash regression from plugin parameter array fix

From http://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox36.html

Yesterday, Cranium Solutions, a GoGrid Partner announced the launch of an automated cloud-based security assessment tool within the GoGrid Exchange.

About Cranium Solutions

Cranium Solutions’ flagship product, ASAP™ (Automated Security Assessment Program), is the first fully automated end-to-end network security testing solution that runs as a Cloud Based Service.  Businesses can perform simple and automated Vulnerability Assessments and Penetration Tests of any systems they have deployed on the GoGrid Cloud. Furthermore, the Cranium Solutions ASAP Service is a GSI based service that can be setup in minutes and requires no configuration by the customer unless they are performing assessments of servers that do not have external IP addresses.

Cranium Solutions on the GoGrid Exchange

There is currently 1 image live on the GoGrid Exchange for Cranium Solutions. It is on a CentOS 5.3 (64 bit) image:

Pricing

The ASAP Service is sold on a prepaid, per-use system, which means customers only have to pay for what they need or expect to use.  To get set up, just click on the “New User” link on the login page once you launch the Image. You will receive a confirmation email after creating your account that allows you to log back in and finish setting things up. On creation you are given 2 free IP credits. You then simply purchase more scan credits using the PayPal button on the login page.

Single device assessment credits are sold through an integrated PayPal system for $15 each, with purchase of credit required prior to the assessment. Blocks of assessment credits are sold at increasing discounts and purchased credits are recorded in the user’s account without expiration or requirement for immediate use. All GoGrid customers that sign up for the ASAP service will be given two free assessment credits after registration for use on two single IP devices.

Cranium Solutions Press Release

The following Press Release was delivered by Cranium Solutions yesterday and is available online as well:

Cranium Solutions Launches Automated Cloud-Based Security Assessment Service on GoGrid

Cranium Solutions ASAP Provides Automated Vulnerability Assessments and Penetration Tests of Cloud Deployments

CONCORD, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Cranium Solutions, Inc, the creator of ASAP (Automated Security Assessment Program) and a leader in end-to-end automated Security Assessment solutions, today announced the release of its cloud-based Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Test services to GoGrid customers, based on its unique virtual portal delivery technology. The Cranium Solutions ASAP service is now available through the GoGrid Cloud in the form of a Partner GoGrid Server Image, enabling GoGrid customers to instantly deploy the portal and begin running complex security testing of their systems in the GoGrid cloud, including systems on a private internal network. As part of the launch, Cranium Solutions will provide each new GoGrid ASAP customer with 2 free IP assessments.

The Cranium Solutions ASAP service enables customers to quickly and easily identify vulnerabilities on their GoGrid servers, public facing or internal. Once found, vulnerabilities can be validated by performing the integrated Penetration Test to determine if they are truly exploitable or false positives. This comprehensive end-to-end assessment process creates highly accurate technical and executive summary reports, which contain recommended remediation steps. The Cranium Solutions ASAP infrastructure is fully hosted in the GoGrid Cloud, assuring that GoGrid customers will always have the latest updates and features without having to ever load a new version of the Virtual Portal Partner GSI.

“The deployment of the Cranium Solutions Virtual Portal on GoGrid enables GoGrid customers to easily assess and protect their systems, in a way that no other cloud provider can match,” said Mark King, CEO of Cranium Solutions. “Cranium’s Cloud based architecture and delivery system leverage the benefits of cloud computing, allowing us to offer a more comprehensive solution without requiring long-term subscriptions or licenses.”

About GoGrid

GoGrid is a Global Leader in Cloud & Hybrid Infrastructure hosting. GoGrid gives users the control of a familiar datacenter environment with the flexibility and immediate scalability of the cloud. For more information, please visit: http://www.GoGrid.com.

About Cranium Solutions

Cranium is privately owned and headquartered in Concord, California. For more information about ASAP and Cranium Solutions, visit: http://www.cranium-solutions.com.

Please be sure to visit the GoGrid Exchange for other solutions that include: Software & Applications, Development & Testing, Disaster Recovery & Backup, Cloud Management, and Security Monitoring & Reporting.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 1.9.0 of the agent software. This has been deployed onto our Cloud Testing servers, and is available to Private Agent subscribers in the download area.

New features include:

• Extra commands – see recent posting.
• Improved timeout handling (there is a 15 minute maximum run time for a script).

Features for the Website Archiving service include:

• Security MD5 hash on images
• Watermark with capture information

We will soon be releasing a new version of the customer portal.

Security is a top priority for Amazon Web Services. Providing a trustworthy infrastructure for you to develop and deploy applications is a responsibility we take very seriously. One important aspect of gaining your trust is being open and transparent about our security processes and continually working toward achieving industry-recognized certifications. Other important aspects include providing you with mechanisms for contacting us about potential security issues and enabling you to conduct security tests of the applications you deploy on AWS. I'm pleased to announce today two new policies: one that outlines our vulnerability reporting process and one that describes how to receive permission to conduct penetration tests of the applications running on your EC2 instances.

A new page in the AWS Security Center describes our vulnerability reporting process. The process is high-priority for us, it's human-driven, and is governed by a service level commitment. Like other technology providers, we believe in the concept of responsible disclosure: let's work together to protect everyone.

Another page in the Security Center describes our penetration testing procedure. Normally, conducting such tests violates our Acceptable Use Policy because these tests are often indistinguishable from real attacks. However, to ensure higher degrees of application security, external testing is an important phase of development and deployment. We put the procedure in place so that we won't respond to your testing as if your instances were under attack.

The e-mail address aws-security@amazon.com is your single point of contact for all things security-related. If you need to contact us about a particularly sensitive issue, you can encrypt your message with our PGP public key. And, of course, if you suspect abuse of EC2 or other AWS services, our abuse reporting process remains in place.

Finally, a small navigational change. We've moved the bulletins off the main page and onto a separate security bulletin list and changed the format so that all bulletins are displayed rather than just the most recent five.

As always, we welcome your comments and feedback. We're here to help you succeed!

> Steve <

Yesterday, I posted an article about a webinar we held that was targeted at current GoGrid users. To round out the mix, we held another webinar geared towards users who might be new to Cloud Computing and GoGrid itself. This second webinar, titled “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy – Learn How You Can Leverage the GoGrid Cloud” was recorded on 6/29/10.

Similar to its predecessor, this webinar covered many aspects of the GoGrid 3.0 release. Presenters were Jeff Samuels, Michael Sheehan and Kole Hicks of GoGrid. The topics we discussed included:

• Overview: Complex Infrastructure Made Easy
• Landscape & GoGrid 3.0: What is the Cloud, GoGrid 3.0 new features
• Partner Ecosystem: Solutions from the GoGrid Exchange
• GoGrid’s Unique Value Proposition: Direction of the GoGrid Cloud

If you were unable to attend this webinar, the full recording is available below as well as on our Vimeo channel:

GoGrid 3.0 Webinar: Learn How You Can Leverage the GoGrid Cloud from GoGrid on Vimeo.

The presentation deck is also embedded below and is similarly available on our SlideShare channel:

GoGrid Webinar: Complex Infrastructure Made Easy – Learn How You Can Leverage the GoGrid Cloud

View more presentations from GoGrid Cloud Hosting.

We realize that it is very difficult to cover all of the features and services available to GoGrid customers. This webinar obviously only touches upon a few key items. We encourage you to explore the newly redesigned GoGrid website and be sure to contact a Sales Representative should you have any additional questions.

If there are other topics you would like to see covered in future webinars (or blog posts), please leave a comment and let me know.

Going to OSCON?  SETI needs your help! 

Cloudant is teaming up with the SETI Institute to help engage citizen-scientists in the search for intelligent life elswhere in the universe.  With some help from Amazon, we've built a 'croudsourced data analytics platform' where ordinary citizens can search and analyze data from the Allen telescope array.  Are you a citizen-scientist?  Do you know about signal processing?  Are  you interested in helping in the search?  Come find out how!

Thursday, July 22nd at OSCON, our own Dr. Dave Hardtke will be demonstrating SETICloud.  He'll be describing the Cloudant platform and how we're bringing the wisdom of the crowds to SETI's search.

Time: 12:20 - 1:20 pm

Place: Room E143/144

SETI is hacking on CouchDB!  Come find out how you can help.

And don't miss Dr. Jill Tarter's keynote talk on "Open SEITQuest" Thursday morning at OSCON:

http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/detail/13425

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Following a request from a customer (Andrew from AMEE), we’ve added a number of new commands to our Functional and Cross Browser testing service. Our standard service always captures a screenshot after the following Selenium commands:

• Open
• Click and Wait
• Open Window
• Refresh
• Refresh and Wait
• Submit
• Submit and Wait
• Go Back
• Go Back and Wait

The new commands do exactly the same as the above Selenium commands, but don’t do an automatic screenshot. They are

• Open – No Screenshot
• Click and Wait – No Screenshot
• Open Window – No Screenshot
• Refresh – No Screenshot
• Refresh and Wait – No Screenshot
• Submit – No Screenshot
• Submit and Wait – No Screenshot
• Go Back – No Screenshot
• Go Back and Wait – No Screenshot

The new commands were added into the 1.9.0 release of the agent software. More details of the commands can be found in the support area of the customer portal – http://portal.cloudtesting.com/.

For more details of the Functional and Cross Browser testing service, please see our website at http://www.cloudtesting.com/.

With the release of GoGrid 3.0 a few weeks ago, we held a webinar titled “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy – Learn About the GoGrid 3.0 Release & Our New East Coast Datacenter“. This webinar was primarily geared towards current GoGrid customers. We also did a webinar the next day that was targeted at people who are new to Cloud Computing and GoGrid. I will be posting that webinar shortly as well.

This webinar was recorded on June 28, 2010, the day of the official release of GoGrid 3.0. Presenters were Mario Olivarez & Justin Kitagawa of GoGrid and Ryan Holland of TrendMicro. The topics included:

• Overview: Complex Infrastructure Made Easy – GoGrid’s unique value proposition
• GoGrid 3.0: The latest version of the GoGrid platform – East Coast demo
• GoGrid Security: New services from Cisco, Fortinet, TrendMicro & Sentrigo
• PCI Compliance: PCI compliance in the GoGrid Cloud – Demo with TrendMicro
• Questions & Answers

I realize that not all GoGrid customers were able to attend this webinar, so I have provided the full recording below (it is also available on our Vimeo channel):

GoGrid 3.0 Webinar: Learn About the GoGrid 3.0 Release & New Datacenter from GoGrid on Vimeo.

Also, for those interested in seeing just the presentation slide deck, that too is available for viewing below (as well as online in our SlideShare channel):

GoGrid 3.0 Webinar: Complex Infrastructure Made Easy – Learn About the GoGrid 3.0 Release & New Datacenter

View more presentations from GoGrid Cloud Hosting.

If you have any questions about the content that was covered within this webinar, please leave a comment on this post and I will be sure that it is answered. Also be sure to check the “Webinar” category on the GoGrid blog for past webinars that have been delivered.

Are there any topics you would like covered in future webinars? Please let me know.

GoGrid continues to build out our Executive Team with the announcement that Mark Worsey has joined GoGrid as Chief Information Officer.

The following Press Release was distributed today:

GoGrid Names Mark Worsey Chief Information Officer
Infrastructure and Internet Veteran Joins Cloud Hosting leader

San Francisco, CA – July 21, 2010 – GoGrid, a leading Cloud Infrastructure and Hybrid Hosting Provider, today announced that it has appointed Mark Worsey as Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President of Technology. Worsey brings to the GoGrid team expansive industry expertise ranging from technology platform development to world-wide network operations. Worsey will be responsible for all technological and architectural advancements as well as managing the operating strategies for GoGrid’s products and services.

We’re proud to have Mark’s leadership driving GoGrid’s innovative engineering, technology and operations departments,” said GoGrid CEO & Co-Founder, John Keagy. “We will look to Mark’s technological vision and expertise to enable GoGrid to continue to surpass the expectations of our thousands of customers every day.”

Throughout his career, Worsey has successfully scaled and led numerous technology organizations. Prior to joining GoGrid, he was responsible for worldwide technology operations, customer service and product development as CIO and VP of Technology at a Safeway subsidiary Blackhawk Network, a leading prepaid and gift card payments processing company. Worsey spent 14 years at Anderson Consulting as a leader in its Advanced Technology Group.  He has also held senior technology leadership positions at industry-changing firms including Xign Corporation and Netscape Communications. As the VP of Engineering and Operations at Netscape, Worsey successfully managed and delivered a series of pioneering online services to include MyNetscape, Netcenter and the Netscape General Store through the acquisitions of Netscape by AOL and then Time Warner.

As a CIO myself, I deeply appreciate the need for scalable infrastructure – available on demand – delivered in a way that allows me to reduce spend,” said Worsey. “GoGrid nails this ROI value proposition and feature requirements for its customers better than any other provider in the market.  I’m ecstatic to be working with a fantastic team on delivering the most innovative cloud infrastructure solutions available.”

Worsey holds a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science from Purdue University.

More information on GoGrid’s thought-leading Executive Team can be found at: http://www.gogrid.com/about/executive-bios.php

About GoGrid

GoGrid is a Global Leader in Cloud & Hybrid Infrastructure hosting. GoGrid enables sysadmins, developers, and IT professionals to create, deploy, and control free f5 load balanced cloud infrastructures and complex hosted virtual server networks with full root access/administrative server control. GoGrid physical and virtual server instances maintain industry standard specifications with no requirement to learn proprietary standards. Deploying GoGrid infrastructure takes minutes via a web control panel or GoGrid’s API. GoGrid gives users the control of a familiar datacenter environment with the flexibility and immediate scalability of the cloud. For more information, please visit: http://www.GoGrid.com.

The Press Release is available online on PRWeb as well as on the GoGrid site.