Pinterest, Flipboard, Foursquare and Netflix were among the many sites impacted by the latest Amazon Web Services outage, but none inspired more hand-wringing than Reddit, the increasingly infamous community that some have called the “secret backbone of the Internet” (it’s often the starting point for viral content).

Where some saw nothing but bad news, the marketing team at Joyent, a competing cloud provider, recognized an opportunity. In a post on the company blog, Joyent made its pitch to Reddit, promising 99.999% uptime and a storage block that doesn’t depend on network connections to work — all of which would translate to better availability of rage comics, AMAs and Ryan Gosling memes.

The post demonstrated that Joyent knows its way around the Reddit community, but how did the notoriously skeptical Redditors respond? With a mixture of follow-up jokes, insults and, well, some serious questions about Joyent’s claims. “Nobody can guarantee they won’t let you down at some point,” said user calzoneman. Others pointed to Joyent’s much-publicized issues with honoring lifetime accounts.

And then there’s platinumbinder, whose comment may sum up the sentiment of productivity-seeking managers everywhere: “I have a feeling that reddit downtime is actually beneficial for the world, so hosting on servers that have reasonable amounts of downtime is actually a positive thing.”

It’s doubtful that Reddit will actually make any kind of switch, but you have to give points to Joyent for creativity. Right? Ok, go back to wasting time now.

Much of the IT action was in San Francisco this week as VMworld 2012 was in full swing, but there’s a whole other world out there, and plenty of cloud and big data hype to fill it. Here are some of the week’s best quotes from around the industry.

 “Is this an honest maneuver? Do they want to drive OpenStack forward? Or is it a Trojan horse?”
- Piston Cloud Computing CEO Joshua McKenty, assessing VMware’s surprise move to join the open-source cloud service as a Gold Member this week. OpenStack has long been seen as a competitor to VMware, but some think the company has realized its less than ideal standing in the cloud market.

“I don’t even know what the ballpark number for a server is — for me, it would be like knowing what the price of a sword is.”
- Daniel Gross, co-founder of Cue, one of many companies using Amazon Web Services for its computing needs and apparently saving a lot of money in the process. The company got some major love for its cloud services from the New York Times this week, and recently introduced reserved instances to add to its established on-demand model.

“The reality is that people’s expectations of what is needed are rapidly maturing.”
- Outgoing VMware CEO Paul Maritz, talking about how the virtualization game has changed (and Microsoft is still behind) during VMworld 2012. See more of what he had to say about why his company is still the leader in this VMworld video – and read more meaty virtualization quotes from the show over at SearchVirtualDesktop.com.

“It’s like asking people in 1995 if they think that this newfangled ‘Internet’ thing is inflated or not.”
- Laura Teller, chief strategy officer for Opera Solutions, LLC, on whether the hype around big data is justified. Her take: That’s the wrong question to ask.

But what’s their angle? Some think Amazon may be taking notes from unlikely places, that “maybe it’s Amazon pushing the cloud like a drug dealer – get ‘em hooked they stay hooked.” But others know better, as James Staten reports:

Before you jump to the conclusion that the free tier is just a promotion and loss leader for Amazon and thus they will never make it permanent, let me point out that the free tier will actually make money for AWS. It does this in two ways. First, if you know you can shrink your application down to the free tier, you have less incentive to switch platforms and that means AWS can count on you as a customer and can count on revenue when you’re busy. The free tier is teeny, tiny.

What do you think of Amazon’s new symbiotic relationship?

The Fine Print

• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage
• 750 hours of Elastic Load Balancer with 15 GB data processing
• 10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, 1M I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10k snapshot Get Requests and 1k snapshot Put Requests.
• 5GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20k Get Requests, and 2k Put Requests
• 30 GB of internet data transfer (15 GB in & 15 GB out)

Additional freebies will also be made available to current Amazon customers as well as trial users:

• 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB storage
• 100k Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service
• 100k Requests, 100k HTTP notifications and 1k email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service
• Free access to the AWS management console to build and manage your application

Once your twelve month free subscription is up, you begin paying-as-you-go.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Theft of information assets was reported by 27.3% of companies over the past 12 months, up from 18% in 2009. In contrast, reported incidences of theft of physical assets or stock declined slightly from 28% in 2009 to 27.2% in 2010, according to the survey [from the Kroll Annual Global Fraud Report].

So with all of these numbers scaring the enterprise into holding tighter to their users’ information than ever before, is it actually the cloud’s fault? There’s a booming “no” coming from vendors such as Amazon Web Services’ Steve Riley, Rackspace’s Bret Piatt, and founder of Mashery Oren Michels.

One of the theories on where cloud security propaganda comes from is IT execs who don’t want to part with their major IT budgets. “A big security breach that happened in the cloud doesn’t mean a security happened because of the cloud,” Michels clarified.

But just as Randy Bias says that the cloud isn’t a solo services deal, people want to know to what extent additional services are available to help in the deperimeterization of the operating system and the application that happens when moving to the cloud. In other words, how do you harden your application before deployment?

Steve Riley, Senior Technical Program Manager for Amazon Web Services, presented the alternative: If your extremely valuable data is stored in your single data center, the risk of loss is extremely high. Moving to an infrastructure that specializes in minimizing risks means that a single outage goes mostly unnoticed because there are other copies that can quickly be routed to. The key to data security is building to withstand failure and accepting guidance to create your application so that there are fewer risks.

Moving past the “we know what we’re doing” that many vendors tout in the face of questions about their security practices, Amazon Web Services outlined exactly how they ensure your data stays safe, from all angles.

How Does Amazon Web Services Protect Your Data?

• No physical access. No tours of the data centers, all activity logged and monitored.
• They employ the Zen hypervisor with some changes, such as security groups. AWS operates with the mindset that the virtual machines you deploy are your machines. Their operators have no access to your virtual machine.
• There’s no VM to VM path; they enforce traffic via isolation. They know exactly where your data is and do not allow the possibility of overlap or leakage.
• One of the features, security groups, allows you to construct your firewall rules at the console. Rather than opening up your webservers to the internet, you can create a tier above – with all of your security tools – that’s dedicated to scanning incoming traffic before reaching the webserver.
• Virtual Private Cloud: If you’d like to create a virtual private cloud with Amazon, your machines will be stored in AWS, but the end user assigns the IP address via the VPN from the router on your network to the router on AWS’s network. The only way your machines in the AWS can reach the internet is by routing out to your network then back out to the internet. Riley got excited at Amazon’s plans to increase the number of routers that lead into the VPC.
• Amazon S3: In their storage offering, intended for storage and distribution, data analysis, or disaster recovery, they employ separate policies for the container and the object within. The users are expected to define the policies separately, or all at once in the bucket policy.

Riley even had an answer for managing all of the different ways to secure your information: “Encryption is the best possible way to keep sensitive data secure.” Though data encryption has a community of skeptics, Riley proposed creating a flat file with all of your encryption codes, encrypt that file with AWS encryption to which Amazon never grants itself access, and the AWS encryption is deleted with each instance.

How other providers are walking the talk

I’ve since followed up with Rackspace’s Bret Piatt and Mashery’s Oren Michels about how they, too, are demonstrating to their customers that they are securing their data in the cloud and other services. Check back for their responses.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

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