Cloud Services considers security to be an extremely important aspect of cloud computing and realizes it has not been really explored yet. We noticed that most cloud infrastructure providers offer cloud storage solutions, hence an obvious need for a service that will scan the content of the storage for viruses. Cloud Services and Digital Zone have joined efforts to create a cloud-based virus scanner.

The official press release can be found here.

This virus scanner for cloud storage will be built using Cloud Studio and OSGi Cloud. It will support pluggable scanning engines. It is going to be exposed as a web service and could be integrated with Java, PHP, Ruby, Python and almost any other language.

The Cloud Services team is proud to present a new version of Cloud Studio. Main feature that distinguishes this release is the introduction of profiles and here is a short story of why we decided to invent them:

We assume users have a set of images which are regularly utilized. When starting an instance off an image, certain parameters need to be set (instance type, availability zone and more). Making this information into one entity significantly simplifies the process of launching instances, hence the profiles - easily managed collections of parameters needed to start an instance.

Currently we support two types of profiles: generic EC2 profiles and OSGi profiles.

EC2 profiles allow users to create and keep the settings (launch parameters) enabling the execution of basic EC2 instances with just one click:

OSGi profiles allow users to define selection of bundles and Java properties that will be provisioned to OSGi runtime during EC2 instance launch:

Windows, Mac and Linux versions of Cloud Studio 1.0b4 are available for immediate download.

In addition we prepared several screencasts demonstrating newly introduced features (we added audio comments to them):

* Using generic profiles with EC2.

Cloud Services focuses on creating innovative solutions by enabling technologies we believe in to work in the cloud environments. Today we would like to present OSGi - the dynamic module system for Java™.

The article by Peter Kriens, Director of Technology for OSGi Alliance, is addressing many questions a newcomer might have on the benefits of developing with OSGi:

OSGi technology provides solutions to problems that many people simply see as intrinsic aspects of software development in Java and would not call them problems.

We are happy to announce our new release of Cloud Studio with full support of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS).

Screenshot of EBS Volumes view:

Now Studio is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Click here to open "Running Amazon Elastic Block Store in Cloud Studio" screencast in a new window. Download the Studio itself from our download page. We are also open to supporting you in incorporating EBS into your projects.

Since Elastic Block Store feature is not widely known to general public yet, we would like to quote Amazon’s own description of it:

“This new feature provides reliable, persistent storage volumes, for use with Amazon EC2 instances. These (EBS) volumes exist independently from any Amazon EC2 instances, and will behave like raw, unformatted hard drives or block devices, which may then be formatted and configured based on the needs of your application. The volumes will be significantly more durable than the local disks within an Amazon EC2 instance. Additionally, our persistent storage feature will enable you to automatically create snapshots of your volumes and back them up to Amazon S3 for even greater reliability.

OSGi is a Java-based service platform that can be remotely managed. The core part of the specifications is a framework that defines an application life cycle management model, a service registry, an Execution environment and Modules. Based on this framework, a large number of OSGi Layers, APIs, and Services have been defined. OSGi Specification is maintained by OSGi Alliance.

Server side OSGi applications now can also be easily deployed on computing clouds implemented by Amazon (EC2). With several mouse clicks your exported bundles can be uploaded to remote storage (S3) and added to profile (Launch Configuration). Now virtual servers (EC2 instances) containing OSGi framework provisioned with selected bundles can easily be started.

Screenshot of the Profile Editor:

Click here to open OSGi on EC2 video presentation in a new window.

If someone is interested in trying out OSGi Cloud - contact us at studio@service-cloud.com