Book Image

Amazon Web Services: Migrating your .NET Enterprise Application

By : Rob Linton
Book Image

Amazon Web Services: Migrating your .NET Enterprise Application

By: Rob Linton

Overview of this book

Amazon Web Services is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform in the Cloud, which businesses can take advantage of as their needs demand. The Amazon Cloud provides the enterprise with the flexibility to choose whichever solution is required to solve specific problems, ultimately reducing costs by only paying for what you use. While enterprises understand moving their applications among infrastructure they own and manage, the differences in Amazon's infrastructure bring up specific business, legal, technical, and regulatory issues to get to grips with. This step-by-step guide to moving your Enterprise .NET application to Amazon covers not only the concept, technical design, and strategy, but also enlightens readers about the business strategy and in-depth implementation details involved in moving an application to Amazon. You'll discover how to map your requirements against the Amazon Cloud, as well as secure and enhance your application with AWS. This book helps readers achieve their goal of migrating a .NET Enterprise Application to the AWS cloud. It guides you through the process one step at a time with a sample enterprise application migration. After comparing the existing application with the newly migrated version, it then moves on to explain how to make the hosted application better. It covers how to leverage some of the scalability and redundancy built into the Cloud, and along the way you'll learn about all of the major AWS products like EC2, S3, and EBS.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Amazon Web Services: Migrating your .NET Enterprise Application
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Legalities of Cloud Computing


Let's take a moment to talk about some of the legalities of cloud computing. The biggest obstacle that you will encounter when moving to a cloud-computing model, is that of data security and protection.

There are some interesting things to consider here.

Firstly, let's look at how AWS is set up.

AWS hosts its servers in 'regions'. Te current AWS regions are:

  • US-East (Northern Virginia)

  • US-West (Northern California)

  • EU (Ireland)

  • Asia Pacific (Singapore)

As you can see, the four regions cross three separate country boundaries.

Note

When provisioning a resource within the AWS cloud, Amazon guarantees that your data will never leave the geographic region in which it was initially placed.

It is unclear as to what AWS will have committed to in terms of liability. What laws apply to data stored, for instance, in Northern Virginia? The AWS contract stipulates that the State of Washington will govern the AWS Customer Agreement, however, what does this mean for your data?

At this point, Amazon is reluctant to commit to anything other than their click-through agreement (http://aws.amazon.com/agreement), and this will be a big stumbling block for some organizations.

However, in November 2009, AWS completed a SAS70 Type II audit (http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2009/11/11/aws-completes-sas70-type-ii-audit), and as such passes the requirements for the storage and management of customer details and credit card data.

Sarbanes Oxley and HIPAA are also both areas of interest in relation to cloud services. While Amazon does briefly mention both of these in its security papers, neither is addressed directly.

Note

If your organization deals with government or health data, please note that Amazon advises companies to obtain separate legal advice before hosting their applications within the AWS cloud.

Amazon has released a security white paper located at: http://media.amazonwebservices.com/pdf/AWS_Security_Whitepaper.pdf.