Want to get involved?

[Craig Balding]

If you want to get involved in the Skylab project, please reply to this thread, indicating your experience with cloud services and scripting abilities.  If you haven't already, you'll want to get signed up for an Amazon AWS account and then apply to take part in the Amazon VPC program [beta] - you'll get an answer back straight away.

[Tomasz Miklas]

With very little time left for experiments (if any) maybe there will be something I can help with from time to time.

Cloud experience:
I've started playing with EC2 about a year ago but didn't have much time to do anything useful. Over the last few weeks I've picked up my old project (let's say DIY Boinc - kind of), one of the project plans was to port it to EC2 to solve power/cooling issues and get more flexibility/scalability when running bigger tasks. This way I've built my first AMI Scripting - yes (Perl), VPC - no, not yet.

Nearest plans:
Find some more time and rewrite my 'grid' to scale better, use cloud solutions to run workers - possibly with some extra logic to get the lowest cost per cycle.

I'm sure some of that stuff can feed back to Skylab

[Craig Balding]

Sounds like an interesting project.  Saw your tweets on it the other day.  Look forward to hear more!

And yes, for sure, there will be crossover into stuff useful for Skylab...so welcome along for the ride

[Bart Zolnowski]

I would like to devote some of my time to the Skylab Project. I am fairly new to the Cloud Computing but I am very interested in the subject from the security, regulatory, and compliance point of view.

Cloud Experience:
As mentioned above, I am fairly new to the cloud computing. However, I have been using Linux for about 3 - 4 years, used bash scripting extensively, and wrote some awk scripts etc. I am looking into playing with the Apache Hadoop Project on my own custom built sever. It's a little bit out of date but good enough to run Linux I have used BacTrack, Metasploit, and various vulnerability scanners.

On daily basis I am security fanatic researching and reading whatever I can get my hands on the subject of Security.

Looking forward to working with you on the project.

[Craig Balding]

Great - thanks Bart.  Look forward to collaborating with you.  I plan to organise some tasks in the next week or so that different people can choose to take on.

[clbrooks97]

Hi, Craig. I'm a security teacher, course developer and trainer. My experience with the Cloud so far is minimal: I've looked into EC2 and created and stored some files in S3, and I've written up a couple of training modules on securing storage in the Cloud, as well as doing data forensics in the cloud. As far as scripting goes, I was very adept at Perl and Tcl/Tk at one time, as well as shell scripting, and I can read Ruby and Python code. Skills are quite rusty at this point. I'd like to contribute what I can as time and my day job allow.

[Craig Balding]

All good - thanks for dropping by and welcome to Skylab

[jack]

Hey,
I talked to you a little bit this morning on Twitter. I've been working on something similar to this for the last couple of weeks. I watched the video and it definitely seems like we're on the same track. I've been working on a Backtrack 4 AMI for EC2, which I'm actually planning on uploading today. I'm not totally certain it will work, but I'm hopeful!

One thing I was curious about, were you able to get anything going with the Amazon VPC? You talked about it a bit in the introductory video, but when I looked into it, it seemed like it required too much infrastructure to be very portable/cheap/easy. The route I was taking was more geared towards creating a bastion host and using security groups to restrict access and keep everything contained.

To answer your specific questions, I have a fair bit of experience with the amazon cloud. Mostly for quickly getting up POC systems and the like - somewhat similar to this project it sounds like. I'm pretty good with PHP, Ruby, bash scripting, but haven't scripted a lot with amazon.

Thanks!
JK