It seems with the VMWare conference that the relative quiet has brought out the virtualization fairy’s out to play! What a difference a week makes. All of a sudden we get:
- VMware announces VMware vCloud Express, goes head to head with Amazon EC2
- VMware today announced vCloud Express, a new class of service that will deliver on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing power as a service, much like Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
- A PCI-Compliant Cloud? Not at Amazon
- Very interesting debate and conclusion regarding Amazon EC2 & PCI. Worth a read!
- Azure Reference Architecture Explored with Project Riviera
- If you’ve been wanting to see how a multi-tenant architecture works with Windows Azure Platform, you’ll want to see Project Riviera. The project has been released on MSDN and includes source code. Interestingly the sample application is a loyalty application!
- Cloud Cartography & Side Channel Attacks
- This is obviously dependent on the availability of a weakness in the hypervisor, but definitely an interesting concept none the less.
Security
- Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) FTP Server Buffer Overflow Lets Remote Authenticated Users Execute Arbitrary Code
- Any one running IIS 5, 5.1, or 6 and FTP – watch out!
- New version of WiKID authentication server
- WiKID Systems announced version 3.4 of the WiKID Strong Authentication Server in Enterprise and Community Editions. New features include built-in support for the SAML Single Sign-On Service for Google Apps, a new self-registration process for Active Directory users and extended vendor-specific RADIUS attributes.
- Pretty interesting stuff, not seen this before.
Hopefully my writers block has been solved and I’ll get back to writing some code 
Gareth