Thought stream

Handling sensitive data Define sensitive data for your application. Classify as sensitive data and confidential data. Sensitive data is something like password, credit card account number, something that you should not compromise at all. Confidential data could be your customer’s health record, something that requires your permission before its usage. So, you need to define sensitive data in the context of your application. There are many ways to protect the sensitive data in transit; the easiest way is to use SSL. This is nothing different than handling sensitive data in any traditional application.   However, make sure you apply this rule while designing your application for cloud deployment. Alternatively, you can encrypt the sensitive data and transport. Be noted that any kind of protection you design, will have implications on performance. However this is ignorable considering the nature of sensitive data. If you just want to protect your data from being tampered du...

Illustration: Say, you have public URL to access abc.mp4. http://mydomain.com/abc.mp4 . And it is made available under pay per download subscription. This is a public URL and anybody can access, but there is a business model around it, which is ‘Pay per download’. This is a revenue leakage if everyone is able to download the asset. How should you make it available for download, but only for one download? You want this URL to be invalid after one usage. Answer: Use signed URLs. Signed URLs are usually short lived URLs. Servers are designed to deny access after the expiry of such URLs. It is also possible to specify additional information along with Signed URL, usually will be additional information is determined by the server in focus. How does it work? Continuing from the illustration, I define a policy. Policy is nothing but information that your client application will be able to communicate with server application so that server can decide the nature of access t...

GlusterFS is cluster file system that is already tried and tested disk file systems like ext3, ext4, xfs, more to store data. It can easily scale up to petabytes of storage under a single mount point for the user. It is free and open source software available as GNU GPL v3 and some parts as GNU GPL v2. GlusterFS Servers run glusterfsd daemon to export local file system as volume and glusterfs client process can connect to servers through custom protocol over TCP/IP.   The final volume can be mounted by the client using NFS v3 protocol also. Why should I use this? I find it useful typically in cloud environment where I need to scale out. More importantly, when I use AWS cloud, GlusterFS is available as AMI. With standard and premium support subscriptions available from Gluster, the option enables your solution's business continuity by providing disaster recovery capability. Also, Now, I can view file storage service as a commodity. Finally, Gluster is the only high...

During the recent assignment, I encountered this question and I decided to answer through this post. In the olden days of implementation, deployment architecture was the last hurdle before pushing the application to production mode. I sincerely believe that, the equations have changed now a days. Mainly, because, we are moving away from traditional deployment options like purchasing the hardware and managing the data centers or outsource the data center management to some hosting service provider.  Today, we have deployment options as commodities. I would probably go one step ahead and say, if you are considering to host your application on platforms like GAE, Force.com you do not need to even worry about usual problem scenarios of scalability, availability and fail-over. Be assured that your hosting platform takes care of these aspects.  But PaaS has its own limitations. However, I am in favor of infrastructure services as a commodity as it gives you the c...

This blog provides an insight to plan your hosting options. Calculating CIR What is CIR? In simple terms, it is the quantity of bandwidth measured as Committed Information Rate in megabits. CIR allows you to channel as much web traffic as possible within a given bandwidth. CIR calculation will help you to model your deployment option, whether to avail hosted model, or host the application in one's own dedicated server, or avail hosting provider service for monthly transfer or avail hosting provider service in pro-rata basis. What are the important parameters one needs to consider? One important parameter is, total number of simultaneous sessions that your web application is expecting. With this value, we can derive certain other parameters that would help us in arriving at CIR. Do not mean that simultaneous sessions imply simultaneous connections. This only means that, if we assume each session represents one user, we have that many users using the application at any gi...

Guyz, for the past 3 years, I have been indulging myself in media distribution and delivery platforms. Currently, working with one such customer who has 7 products under his belt and is on aquiring spree.. I would like to discuss the open source option for video delivery, that is Kaltura. KalturaCE is available for free and is an open source option for video distribution. Predominantly built over LAMP stack and has flex/flash components for the consumption layer. What I found after installing on my Ubuntu is that this platform offers basic media management features like publisher management, content uploading, transcoding, managing encoding profiles, playlist management, player embedding, playlist embedding and so forth. There is no extensive, i would actually say, a good mechanism to create and categorize content the way many want it to be. Kaltura provides client library APIs in java, C#, PHP to enable existing solutions to go media distribution enabled. The platform comes with ...

Here is the list of MIME types for different file extensions. mime-mapping extension='.html' mime-type='text/html' mime-mapping extension='.aif' mime-type='audio/x-aiff' mime-mapping extension='.aiff' mime-type='audio/x-aiff' mime-mapping extension='.aifc' mime-type='audio/x-aiff' mime-mapping extension='.ai' mime-type='application/postscript' mime-mapping extension='.au' mime-type='audio/basic' mime-mapping extension='.asc' mime-type='text/plain' mime-mapping extension='.asf' mime-type='video/x-ms-asf' mime-mapping extension='.asx' mime-type='video/x-ms-asf' mime-mapping extension='.avi' mime-type='video/x-msvideo' mime-mapping extension='.bin' mime-type='application/octet-stream' mime-mapping extension='.bcpio' mime-type='application/x-bcpio' mime-mapping ...