CloudComputing

A new survey shows that the growing tendency among employees to purchase and use consumer cloud apps for storing and sharing corporate data without involving IT departments has caused new risks for enterprises.

“The survey results are an eye-opener of how cloud applications have made it easy for employees to take information with them when they leave a company,” said Kevin Cunningham, founder and president of SailPoint, in a prepared statement accompanying the report.

Another recent report by the Ponemon Institute showed that a lack of control over who has access to confidential and sensitive information often exacerbates the insider threat problem. The survey of over 2,200 employees in both U.S. and European organizations found that many employees who work in areas such as sales, financing and accounting often have too much access to intellectual property, customer lists, contact information and other valuable corporate data.

More than 70 percent of those polled said they had access to corporate data to which they should not have access. About 55 percent described that access as “frequent” and “very frequent.” Unsurprisingly, respondents in the survey believed that IT security controls and data oversight at their organizations were weak, with 4 in 5 IT practitioners concurring and admitting their organizations did not enforce a strict least-privilege data security model.

CoreOS is a new startup company which provides Open Source Operating System > CoreOS.

CoreOS provides only the minimal functionality required for deploying applications inside software containers. CoreOS is actively developed, primarily by Alex Polvi, Brandon Philips and Michael Marineau .

Now CoreOS is developing Rocket which is a new container runtime in competion to Docker which is tought to have become complex and deviated from its originaly intended simplicity.

Docker is a shipping container for the online universe. It is a tool that lets developers neatly package software and move it from machine to machine. Today, when running large online applications such as a Google or a Twitter or a Facebook, developers and businesses often spread software across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of machines, and Docker provides a more efficient means of doing so.

Like Docker, Rocket is an open source project, but unlike Docker, Rocket is an attempt to create a project that is “more open,” that allows for contributions from a much wider community. It is going to be built in a way that anyone can build their own runtime that works with the App Container format.

According to Alex Polvi, CEO and Founder of CoreOS, Docker is no longer the simple container format it was originally designed to be. The trouble, he says, is that the software that runs Docker containers—known as the Docker Engine or Docker runtime—has evolved into something that’s far more complex than it was in the past.

So, Polvi and CoreOS have built a new container format known as App Container, and they’ve created a runtime for this format called Rocket.

On December 1, 2014 Alex Polvi explained a new prototype version of Rocket on GitHub (the largest open source code host in the world). He said they want to begin gathering feedback from their community and explained why they are building Rocket.

"When we started building CoreOS, we looked at all the various components available to us, re using the best tools, and building the ones that did not exist. We believe strongly in the Unix philosophy: tools should be independently useful, but have clean integration points. We hope this is reflected in tools that we build."

"When Docker was first introduced to us in early 2013, the idea of a “standard container” was striking and immediately attractive: a simple component, a composable unit, that could be used in a variety of systems. ..We thought Docker would become a simple unit that we can all agree on."

"Unfortunately, ..It is not becoming the simple composable building block we had envisioned."

According to Alex Polvi, the return of simplicity which was the starting point of Docker is an essential ingredient of Rocket. He lists what is important to them in the design of a container as follows:

Composable. All tools for downloading, installing, and running containers should be well integrated, but independent and composable.
Security. Isolation should be pluggable, and the crypto primitives for strong trust, image auditing and application identity should exist from day one.
Image distribution. Discovery of container images should be simple and facilitate a federated namespace, and distributed retrieval. This opens the possibility of alternative protocols, such as BitTorrent, and deployments to private environments without the requirement of a registry.
Open. The format and runtime should be well-specified and developed by a community. We want independent implementations of tools to be able to run the same container consistently.

He says "we cannot in good faith continue to support Docker’s broken security model without addressing these issues. Additionally, in the past few weeks Docker has demonstrated that it is on a path to include many facilities beyond basic container management, turning it into a complex platform."

Polvi explains why they have not implemented Rocket inside of Docker by saying "if the App Container specifications were implemented inside of Docker, the projects will be interoperable, meeting the original goal of the manifesto. CoreOS will evaluate contributing this work once App Container matures."

Polvi explains that "CoreOS" will continue to ship Docker. "We will continue to make sure CoreOS is the best place to run Docker. We will save the details for a future post, once Rocket has developed further, but expect Docker to continue to be fully integrated with CoreOS as it is today."

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