Those of you studying the vmstat(8) man page may be wondering what the ’st’ figure is in the CPU column. The manual refers to it as “Time stolen from a virtual machine“. More specifically:
It’s the time the hypervisor scheduled something else to run instead of something within your VM. This might be time for another [...]

I was browsing through twitter mentions of @adrian_otto and found one posted by Ian Thompson mentioning an article about weak randomness in the cloud. It suggests that because there may be insufficient entropy sources on a Cloud Server or instance that it may make it easier to guess random number sequences because different cloud servers [...]

Check my post from today on the Rackspace Cloud blog. It covers several tips on planning ahead when writing a web-scale application.