High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

How do you design a reliable distributed file system when the expected availability of the individual nodes are only ~1/5? That is the case for P2P systems. Dominik Grolimund, the founder of a Swiss startup Caleido will show you how! They have launched Wuala, the social online storage service which scales as new nodes join the P2P network.

The goal of Wua.la is to provide distributed online storage that is:

• large
• scalable
• reliable
• secure

by harnessing the idle resources of participating computers.

This challenge is an old dream of computer science. In fact as Andrew Tanenbaum wrote in 1995:
"The design of a world-wide, fully transparent distributed filesystem fot simultaneous use by millions of mobile and frequently disconnected users is left as an exercise for the reader"

After three years of research and development at at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology on a distributed storage system, Caleido is ready to unveil the result: Wuala. Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. It enables its users to trade parts of their local storage for online storage and it allows us to provide a better service for free. In this Google Tech Talk, Dominik will explain what Wuala is and how it works, and he will also show a demo.

In the more cool stuff I've never heard of before department is something called Self Cleansing Intrusion Tolerance (SCIT). Botnets are created when vulnerable computers live long enough to become infected with the will to do the evil bidding of their evil masters. Security is almost always about removing vulnerabilities (a process which to outside observers often looks like a dog chasing its tail). SCIT takes a different approach, it works on the availability angle. Something I never thought of before, but which makes a great deal of sense once I thought about it.

With SCIT you stop and restart VM instances every minute (or whatever depending in your desired window vulnerability)....

This website has been a great resource for helping me to understand the successful (and failed) scalable network designs from organizations that have actually done it, but I haven't seen any explicite explanations about secure remote administration of these systems.

I understand that the *nix people love to SSH, and the windows gang has their RDP, but how does one go about creating a network architecture that both allows one to manage their systems and does its best to avoid hacker interest? As I imagine, no big website will have the SSH/RDP/FTP ports open on the web server, so how is it that they go about remotely administering their geographically diverse groups of servers securely?