Clouds, Security and Enterprises

(This blog piece was the streamlined transcript of a community video talk I gave.) Enterprise data protection is an integral part of any organisation’s data security architecture and operations. As a characteristic of the cloud era we are in, more and more data nowadays resides in cloud environments.  In a typical scenario of an enterprise’s AWS cloud setup, multiple AWS accounts are used – there are good reasons why multiple OUs (Organizational Units) and accounts are structured for a given organisation.  Behaviour differences exist between these AWS accounts. Though they all belong to the same enterprise, AWS resources for a workload in an AWS account may behave differently to another workload and its resources in a different account. The behaviours here refer to the traits of how certain resources communicate and how certain data is accessed. As a simple example, an S3 bucket in an account is designed to be frequently accessed by a vast number of users (even including the g...

Amazon FSx for OpenZFS, ‘a fully managed shared storage built on the popular OpenZFS file system’, was launched in AWS Sydney Region (ap-southeast-2) in April 2022. Powered by Graviton processors (AWS designed processors that as per AWS delivering a major leap in performance and capabilities and providing the best price performance), Amazon FSx for OpenZFS enables a range of new capabilities, such as higher performance, lower latency, broad access by Linux, Windows and MacOS operating systems, all at a lower price point against other comparable shared storage services offered by AWS. OpenZFS file system has its root from the ZFS file system, which was developed by Sun Microsystems over twenty years ago, in 2001, for the proprietary Solaris operating system. ZFS was designed with considerations for large, powerful servers at the time, which use-case focus was leaning more towards performance, functionality and reliability, rather than economical costing. A few years later in 2005, Sun M...

Let’s start by thinking of a stock exchange’s trading platform, where hundreds of thousands of transactions may occur in a single second and millisecond-level differences in the arrival times of trade requests matter. This gives some idea on high performance databases. There are widespread use cases of high-performance databases in all industries - anywhere ultra-low latency and high volume of real-time concurrent transactions are needed. Naturally, such performances cannot rely on the speeds of hard drives, even those of SSDs. There have been many technologies and heralds in this field; one particularly worth mentioning is the open source Redis project, initialised by Salvatore Sanfilippo more than ten years ago. Not sure how many still think of the ‘Remote Dictionary Server’ origin when the word is frequently mentioned nowadays. Redis has become the name for that popular open source, in-memory data structure store that is a cache, a database, or a real-time data platform. Redis adopt...