From: "Suresh Ramasubramanian" <ops.lists@gmail.com> Subject: Re: amazonaws.com?

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 1:28 PM, Colin Alston <karnaugh@karnaugh.za.net> wrote:

[[.. sneck ..]]

With respect, in such cases, amazon is better off firewalling outbound port 25 (or indeed, outbound anything at all) for accounts that dont specifically ask for it. Quite a lot of EC2 compute time is for number crunching and such - not just hosting, or email, or ..

I'm hard-pressed to think of a single letigimate use for a _compute_ cluster that requires outgoing access to more than a handful (i.e. an _itemizable_ list) of machines. Am I missing something obvious? If not, such a "block all outgoing, except for listed exceptions" policy could be 'trivially' implemented with an extra list field on the sign-up form, coupled with automated transformation into firewall rules.