• Remus – Transparent High Availability for Xen – Remus provides transparent, comprehensive high availability to ordinary virtual machines running on the Xen virtual machine monitor. It does this by maintaining a completely up-to-date copy of a running VM on a backup server, which automatically activates if the primary server fails
• OpenSSL is written by monkeys – Marco Peereboom's rant on OpenSSL. To be honest, looking at the examples of OpenSSL code, it's difficult to disagree – sorry, Ben!

• 19 Ways to Build Physical Security into a Data Center – Quite old now (2005), but still very relevant. It doesn't matter how many layers of security you have in the cloud infrastructure software if you allow unauthorized access to the hardware!
• Cloud Cube Model: Selecting Cloud Formations for Secure Collaboration – From the Jericho Forum – a model for organizing cloud computing into four dimensions – so it really should be a hypercube
• Cloud Standards Wiki – Not sure who actually runs this, but it's a useful collection of links relating to cloud standards
• Daoli Project – Interesting – a project to leverage Trusted Computing in the Cloud – the hypervisor becomes part of the Trusted Computing Base (TCB).

• OpenCrowd – Cloud Computing > Cloud Taxonomy, Landscape, Evolution – Useful cloud taxonomy diagram
• Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds – Mapping Amazon EC2's internals and instantiating co-resident machine instances with a view to mounting cross-VM side channel attacks.
• Cloud Security Alliance – Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing – Comprehensive overview of the cloud security landscape
• Keyboard Shortcuts for Gmail – Note – you'll have to enable keyboard shortcuts in Gmail Settings
• Keyboard Shortcuts for Google Reader – Great time-savers for Google's feed reader
• Cloud Computing Ecosystem Map v1.0: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants – Mega-map (by Troy Angrignon) of everything cloud related
• OpenCrowd – Cloud Computing > Cloud Taxonomy, Landscape, Evolution – Useful cloud taxonomy diagram
• Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds – Mapping Amazon EC2's internals and instantiating co-resident machine instances with a view to mounting cross-VM side channel attacks.
• Cloud Security Alliance – Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing – Comprehensive overview of the cloud security landscape
• Keyboard Shortcuts for Gmail – Note – you'll have to enable keyboard shortcuts in Gmail Settings
• Keyboard Shortcuts for Google Reader – Great time-savers for Google's feed reader
• Cloud Computing Ecosystem Map v1.0: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants – Mega-map (by Troy Angrignon) of everything cloud related
• Brewer’s CAP Theorem – Nice article on Brewer's CAP (Consistency, Availability, Partition Tolerance – pick any two) theorem and its implications for distributed systems. Interesting to see the parallels with eventual consistency in directory services. Bonus reference to the Sex Pistols' seminal 4th June 1976 Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall gig in the intro!

• The OpenSSO REST Interfaces in Black / White – DocTeger gives a comprehensive explanation of OpenSSO's REST-like identity services, with the usual cool music video at the end
• Directory "Engineering" – Ludo’s sketches – Nice – an OpenDS engineer has built a hardware dashboard for Sun's open source directory server

I'm currently reading 'Programming Amazon Web Services'

It’s the end of my second week at Huawei, and things are looking good. I’ve done a LOT of reading, getting up to speed on the non-identity parts of cloud computing, and we’ve spent some quality time around the whiteboard. I’ve also booked my first trip to Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen, which will be my first visit to mainland China (I went to a Liberty Alliance plenary meeting in Hong Kong a few years back).

One news item that caught my eye – Matt Bross (formerly BT’s CTO) has joined Huawei. BT has some very smart people, and it looks like Matt is no exception – I’m looking forward to meeting him when he visits the Huawei site in Santa Clara!

Talking of hiring, we’re still recruiting for the ‘virtual data center’ team – see Geoff’s blog entry – so, if you’re into large scale identity/security, storage, or systems and network management, drop me an email at  with your resume, the sooner the better!

• Microsoft’s grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse? – Entertaining rant from Charlie Booker at The Guardian on the 'shitasmic' Windows 7 Launch Party video.
• brain aided dancing: a mix for the MIGHTY! designers republic – A one-hour-plus mix of tracks with one thing in common – cover artwork by the Designers Republic. I must have about half the tracks here – Chakk, Age of Chance, Krush, The Orb, Pulp and, of course, the fabulous Pop Will Eat Itself. Marvelous!

• Enabling Web Service Security With OpenSSO WSS Agent: Part 1 – Mrudul Uchil, Kamna Jain and Rick Palkovic explain how to secure a JAX-WS web service with OpenSSO.
• Federating to Salesforce CRM in Under 5 Minutes – The Smoking Monkey – The ever-creative Smoking Monkey (aka Daniel Raskin) shows how to hook OpenSSO up to SalesForce in less than five minutes.

• Amazon Web Services: Overview of Security Processes – This document is intended to answer questions such as “How does AWS help me ensure my data are secure?” Specifically, AWS physical and operational security processes are described for network and infrastructure under AWS’ management, as well as service-specific security implementations.
• The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines – Written by Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle, a distinguished engineer and a vice president respectively at Google, this book describes the architecture of 'warehouse-scale computers', the main factors influencing their design, operation, and cost structure, and the characteristics of their software base.

I started work this morning at Huawei’s Santa Clara office, specifically in the ‘Virtual Data Center’ team with Geoff Arnold. So far, the best description of what I’ll be doing is in Geoff’s blog entry – Building a Team.