Alpha Cloud - Alpha Anywhere Developer's Guide
Overview
Alpha Cloud is about deploying applications directly from Alpha Anywhere to a robust web site with minimal delay and cost. Deployment is easy with reasonable defaults, but you are also in control of a rich set of options. If you have a single web site with a single application, you will find that it is easy to deploy. As your requirements grow, you have the tools right in Alpha Anywhere to manage your environment and how your applications are deployed. Your applications will scale as much as you need them to.
Alpha Cloud currently runs on the Amazon AWS infrastructure. We take advantage of the work Amazon has done in creating a robust, scaleable virtual data center that can be automatically provisioned. Amazon has a number of data centers on multiple continents. Alpha Cloud can take advantage of those data centers.
Alpha Cloud runs on the same Alpha Anywhere Application Server for IIS that you can license. You can absolutely license and install Alpha Anywhere Application Server for IIS on your own Amazon account and manage your cloud infrastructure yourself. Alpha Cloud eliminates the need to learn Amazon AWS, create your own startup scripts and get your application set up on the cloud. As you will see, there are many other benefits to deploying using the Alpha Cloud environment. You can also reduce the cost of low volume or occasionally used web sites (including test and development) by sharing servers with other Alpha Cloud subscribers.
A Special Note About Security
Because Alpha Cloud is built on the Amazon AWS infrastructure, we automatically get a certain level of isolation from other tenants of the Amazon ecosystem. Amazon also invests significant effort in monitoring the environment and traffic from the internet. This does not mean that your web site is protected from attacks from malicious web clients. If anything, recent media reports of security breaches at some well known public companies should be a reminder that we all face a continuing challenge.
Keeping your web sites secure is something that Alpha Software is deeply committed to. Protecting your company assets and those of your customers is a responsibility that we all share, and that will require that you invest in along with Alpha Software Corporation. Some of the policies you will want to adhere to include:
- Protect passwords for all of your cloud users.
- Create TLS (also called SSL) certificates specific to each host and upload them to your cloud configuration. Never use a certificate that is shared between an in-house web site and your cloud based web sites.
- Limit access to your database and be sure to limit the rights and privileges of your application connection string account.
- Be sparing when authorizing users to manage resources for your cloud subscription. There is a fine grained level of control built in to Alpha Cloud so you can delegate permissions on an as-needed basis.
- Report any concerns or signs of intrusion to Alpha Cloud support immediately upon discovering them!
- Monitor the Alpha Software security page on a regular basis for alerts and best practices in protecting your deployed applications.