Introducing Agentless Cloud Monitoring

In my thesis work I’m developing a framework built on top of KVM and QEMU which adds the capability of cloud-wide agentless monitoring.  If you’re interested in this line of thinking read on for a high-level introduction and please comment in!

Three properties of the Virtual Machine (VM) abstraction enable and distinguish modern cloud computing: strong isolation, virtualized hardware, and soft-state provisioning. Strong isolation provides isolation between a VM and its host, and between a VM and other VMs executing on the same host. Because of strong isolation, separate entities may share the same host without knowledge of each other in a multi-tenant environment. Virtualized hardware frees a VM from its underlying hardware architecture and devices. This freedom consolidates workloads, now untethered from their hosts, by migrating them as the work intensity varies, and assigning resources only when needed. Soft-state provisioning reduces the time to deploy a running service. Requested resources can tightly match current workloads, and as the demands of the workload change over time, resources are elastically scaled. Continue reading

Using Search Engines to Uncover Sensitive Data on the Web

Search engines are powerful tools that can really help you with your work. Apart from finding useful resources and interesting articles, a search engine can be used for other practical purposes. Specifically, if you don’t know which word to use exactly in the phrase you are writing down, or if you do not remember how to spell it, you can use a search engine to find an answer. You can also search for specific terms within a web page and make sure if they exist or not. Continue reading