Cloudy Day: CloudSwitch, AWS Torrents, eDOS

It’s been a busy day for news and commentary about cloud computing. Here’s a roundup:

• Stealthy startup CloudSwitch has raised $7.4 million in a Series A round from Matrix Partners and Atlas Ventures.  The Bedford, Mass. company says only that it is developing “software that will help enterprises dramatically reduce costs.”
• A security researcher has shown how Amazon’s EC2 computing-on-demand service could be used to run TorrentFlux, and open source torrent host. “I can access it from anywhere, uploading Torrent files from wherever, and manage them from my iPhone,”  developer Brett O’Connor tells ComputerWorld.
• Also on the security front, Christofer Hoff and Reuven Cohen discuss an “economic denial of sustainability” (EDoS), their term for an attack in which a botnet consumes a cloud provider’s resources in a controlled fashion, masquerading as legitimate usage while breaking the economic model. I’m not sure what would motivate an attacker to use this approach, but the defensive challenge is recognizing problematic usage patterns.  

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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.