Hi Folks:

Does anyone have any experience with the Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing
service?

We're looking at creating an instance for an automatic image photometry
processor. Everything looks fine and from my standpoint it all makes sense,
but there is one thing that is bothering my Director and I can't answer yet.

With regard to Amazon.com everything is keyed into your account and email
address. My Director, with his Amazon account, went through the process of
setting up an EC2 account. I did the same thing for the experience. Now
within our accounts we have a record of a credit card to pay for what we buy
at Amazon, be it books, 1.5TB hard drives, or the new coffee maker (my
Director is an addict. We joke that we don't have the have astronomy degrees
around here. It's more important to get certified on the coffee maker!).

>From what we've seen, to set up the instances you have to log into the
account to do that. That makes sense, as far as it goes, but what we see is
that once someone logs into the account they can then jump from Amazon area
to Amazon area and - potentially - use the credit card to perhaps get the
latest trashy romance novel, or - heaven help us all! - soap-on-a-rope or
something!

We can't believe a mechanism is not in place to separate the instance
creation from the financial bill-paying side. We have a large problem
believing a large company wouldn't mandate that somehow. Now as far as I can
see, once an instance *is* created it can be managed in the usual sense -
ssh into the box and do what you want - but the creation part seems to give
the person the access to the credit card, and that seems to be a basic
security issue.

Does anyone have any experience with EC2 and how have you dealt with this
problem, if you see it as such?
-- 
Doc Kinne, [KQR]
American Association of Variable Star Observers
(From the Gmail Web Interface)
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