It was during watching the tv-news I heard that the gaming services were down in association with the online release of The Interview. At first I thought it was North Korea that were ddossing the services, but after some research it turned out it was Lizard Squad that were having some fun. I was rather surprised when I opened the Xbox Live status website to see a huge stack-trace which also reviled a central website which the Xbox website gathered data from. First of all, I would have expected Microsoft to know better than allowing stack traces to be shown on their website. Secondly, I would have thought that the ddos attack were affecting the entire Azure cloud, as Xbox Live is hosted inside the Azure Cloud and that cloud applications are normally well filtered from these types of attacks, but no.

This is an essay I wrote for the course IT Management. The task was to write an essay about one of five given topics. The topic I chose was cloud computing. 

Abstract

In the past decades, there has been an explosion in terms of available computer resources. Smaller, cheaper, faster, robust, and scalable computer systems. Virtualization and cloud were a few years ago – and still is some of the most popular buzzwords in IT. It opened a completely new dimension for the computer industry. Instead of investing in a large data center that was used only an hour a day, the computer resources could instead be hired from a cloud vendor such as Amazon or Microsoft. Although many techies says the cloud is the solution to everything, there are several risks and challenges when it comes to exploiting the great advantages of the cloud. In this essay, I will mainly discuss challenges around using PaaS (Platform as a Service). In addition, I will also discuss cases where PaaS would be an excellent choice for an application instead of running the application on premise.