PE2-6.4 Resource Management & Cloud Security

Work through these

• Resources in cloud computing and resource management

  What there is to manage and why managing it is a problem at all. At this scale allocation decisions have real cost consequences, which is what makes it interesting.

• Green computing

  Energy as a design constraint, which is both an environmental and an economic argument. Data centre power is a large enough number to change design decisions.

• Resource scheduling

  Deciding what runs where, which is the core allocation problem. Packing tightly saves money and reduces isolation, which is the trade.

• Inter-cloud resource management: HaaS, IaaS and NaaS

  Managing resources across more than one provider, and the vocabulary textbooks use for it. Recognising these terms keeps older material readable.

• Resource provisioning methods and their types

  How capacity is obtained ahead of demand, and the strategies available. Over-provisioning wastes money and under-provisioning loses requests, which is the whole design problem.

• Cloud security overview; firewalls

  The security half of the topic, starting with the oldest control there is. Where the boundary sits is different here from a traditional network.

• DoS attacks

  Attacks that work by exhausting capacity, which is a particular problem when capacity is billed. The financial version of the attack is specific to this environment.

• Data security and application security

  Protecting the data and the application itself. Encryption at rest and in transit is the baseline, and key management is where it actually goes wrong.

• Virtual machine security and tenant isolation

  Keeping one customer's workload away from another's, which is the assumption the whole model rests on. It closes the topic on the risk that is unique to shared infrastructure.