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In this article, we covered the basics of disaster recovery (DR) and pilot flame architecture using the (AWS) cloud. This post describes the first step towards fault-tolerant architectures as we will explain now.

Functional Architecture of Low Capacity in Standby

A latent functional architecture, while being low capacity, represents a good start in the pursuit of high availability (HA), as it can replace the production infrastructure. Even with the limits resulting from low capacity, functional architecture can support production traffic and provide aid to scaling. You should change the structure of low capacity scaling in order to handle production load.

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It’s gotten easy to publish web applications to the cloud, but the last thing you want to do is establish unique authentication schemes for each one. At some point, your users will be stuck with a mountain of passwords, or, end up reusing passwords everywhere. Not good. Instead, what about extending your existing corporate identity directory to the cloud for all applications to use? Fortunately, Microsoft Active Directory can be extended to support authentication/authorization for web applications deployed in ANY cloud platform. In this post, I’ll show you how to configure Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) to authenticate the users of a Node.js application hosted in Windows Azure Web Sites and deployed via Dropbox.

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The cloud enables great agility and can reduce costs if used right. But does it also manage risk? In fact, the cloud contains the same traditional hosting risks as well as specific related risks to your production environment running on the cloud. With IaaS dynamic environment you pay only for what you use enabling alignment with actual real-time demand. The cloud instance is a temporary resource that is created from a gold master image automatically and on demand. This basic cloud automation capability makes traditional patching redundant and fast provisioning extremely easy. It is an important consideration that changes some basic security deployment perceptions when moving from traditional infrastructure to the cloud.

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Understanding the ‘shared responsibility model’ is one of the most important keys for getting to the cloud and staying there.  Successful ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) cloud adoption cases can be likened to a stool with three legs -

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Amazon’s AWS  VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is like a canvas. It lets you define private networks, the way they interact with each other, routing, and security. Now, it even lets you terminate VPN connections from your main corporate network out-of-the-box and, best of all, it doesn’t cost you anything to use it.

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There are countless benefits to cloud computing including increased efficiency, streamlined processes and reduced costs. It also, however, threatens the security of your online services. Admins may leave ports open to connect to their servers while also giving access to hackers. Additionally, server sprawl deems security unmanageable. Worst of all, security solutions on the market today don’t have appropriate business models and/or technology that can migrate and scale.

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The greatest incentive to move to the cloud is to reduce cost. Organizations invest a lot to that end, but that investment is for not if your cloud isn’t protected. Most often, these mistakes are attributable to either a misinterpreted security policy or cluttered, nearly illegible security rules.

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The latest trends on major sites is to serve content using HTTPS only. It actually offers several interesting advantages, like:

• Protection against Man-in-the-Middle Attacks, where someone is able to hear your connection and get sensitive information (e.g. cookies)
• Avoids (to some extent) some nasty Bots and Spiders
• Conveys more trust from Users, especially those who always ask “Where’s the Key Icon I’ve heard about on TV?” (e.g., your parents)

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The cloud definitely marks a new era. Not only can we manage our resources in a flexible way and with no capital investment, but we can also enjoy the state-of-the-art infrastructure of large cloud providers, like AWS cloud. Specifically, when we use EC2 to compute endless resources, we know that in terms of the durability of our virtual servers, power supply, and storage, we can trust AWS to have the best of the best.

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In case of a disaster we would like to make sure that our applications are still up and running, while taking advantage of our failover hosting/cloud provider. The Disaster Recovery (DR) architecture is driven by the criticality of applications and data. The decision regarding what to back up and deploy eventually translates into ongoing costs that can be extremely significant. Every IT organization has its own high level policy guidelines. These policies are eventually translated into the policy deployed for each of the different applications the enterprise runs. The CIO and its team need to make sure they define both the high level policies and the actual budget that can be spent for DR matters.

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