Provider reboots call cloud computing hypervisor security into question
October 9, 2014
Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Rob Wright.
Following a series of unexpected reboots at several high-profile cloud computing service providers, cloud security experts warn that enterprises should prepare now to mitigate the effects of more security-related service disruptions in the future. Two weeks ago, Amazon Web Services Inc. notified its customers of an EC2 "maintenance update" that required a reboot of about 10% of its hosts globally.
The reboot applied a security update that corrected a flaw in the open source Xen hypervisor, which Amazon uses in its cloud architecture; the host servers required a system restart that rendered them unavailable "for a few minutes" while the patches were being applied, according to a blog post from Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS…
The cloud giant successfully patched the flaw and rebooted the EC2 hosts over the course of several days, staggering the reboots so that no two regions or availability zones were affected at the same time. "The zone by zone reboots were completed as planned and we worked very closely with our customers to ensure that the reboots went smoothly for them," Barr wrote in another blog post…
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