Netflix deals with cloud security concerns
As Netflix commits its future to streaming movies to customers, it relies almost exclusively on cloud services for its infrastructure, raising security concerns that require a new way of thinking, the company's cloud security architect says.
Netflix develops software and pushes it into production via the cloud, which doesn't tolerate many of the characteristics of traditional data centers, says Jason Chan, whose presentation "Practical Cloud Security" was streamed live from United Security Summit in San Francisco. "There's just different ways of doing things in the cloud," Chan says.
For instance, traditionally, applications are long-lived and static. Configuration and code changes are pushed to running systems. In the cloud, new versions are written and they replace the old versions entirely with new instances. There are no patches or configuration pushes. In traditional data centers, different teams may have their own ways of deploying applications and updating them. Standard versions of applications may disappear as groups tweak them for individual use, creating slightly different versions that are impossible to sync. Cloud does not support these practices, he says.
