EBS is basically like iSCSI, but far more complex. There's a lot of proprietary stuff they're doing with it.
Anyone know how it compares in speed to iSCSI or a SAN? From reading the report it sounds like there is A LOT more going on, and I have even heard of people using multiple EBS volumes in a "RAID" like array for faster IO speed. Sounds like way too complex of a system.
Windows Azure Drives are like EBS but they are simply VHD files stored in Page Blobs (Azure's version of cloud storage, similar to Amazon S3) with local caching on each VM instance. I assume they have slower read/write speeds then EBS but seem like they would be much less complex to manage/maintain then a completely separate proprietary storage cluster. Does Amazon have anything similar using S3 or RRS for backing virtual hard drives instead of EBS?
Another way is to look for known source code keywords. You can start by looking for code that imports low level cryptography libraries such as:
C/C++: OpenSSL, Crypto++
Python: PyCrypto, M2Crypto
Java: Java Crypto Extension, BouncyCastle
Then look for routines that perform encryption and decryption. If there’s some code to handle error while decrypting, and/or no sign of MAC usage, then it’s high probability you have found a target for the Padding Oracle attack. Regardless of which method one uses, the most important thing is to analyse and understand the meaning of error messages returned by the target upon receiving mangled ciphertexts. In short, you need to know when the padding is VALID, and when it’s INVALID.
While Microsoft isn't making headlines in the consumer market, over the last decade they have pretty much caught up with or surpassed the competition in the business space (ex: Java, Oracle, PHP, Amazon EC2...). They have however recently started focusing on consumers again with Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7.
And while Apple's per quarter revenue is catching up with Microsoft, in terms of gross profit Microsoft still has about twice the margins that Apple does, which makes sense because software is cheap to produce and distribute. The research and development numbers show that Microsoft spends twice as much of their profits (8 times the total amount) that Apple does, which also makes sense because all Apple really does is find new suppliers with smaller/cheaper/better parts.
"Show business is just like high school, except you get paid." - Martin Mull
