A new open source project dubbed StarCluster has been released aiming to simplify the management of virtual clusters hosted on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.

Red Hat Inc. on May 10 officially rolled out Red Hat Exchange, an online service that aims to deliver preconfigured, fully integrated solution stacks for 14 Red Hat Enterprise Linux-compatible business applications. In actuality, the site has just opened up for business.

A week after adding API access to its Amazon-esque cloud, Rackspace has now open-sourced these APIs. On Wednesday, the company said it had opened up the specs for both its Cloud Servers APIs and Cloud Files APIs under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Canonical is touting private cloud capabilities in an upgrade to its Ubuntu Linux OS being announced on Tuesday. Available for free download on Oct. 29, Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition introduces UEC (Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud), an open-source cloud computing environment based on the same APIs as Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). Businesses can take advantage of private clouds, Canonical said.

This guide will provide all necessary steps on how to create, bundle, upload, run and connect Debian ETCH AMI on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). For this guide we have used a Ubuntu 9.04. However, any other Linux distribution can also be used as long as it contains java and ruby packages.

Microsoft and Amazon.com have signed a wide-ranging patent cross-licensing agreement that provides each company with access to the other's patent portfolio. Specific terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but it was made clear that Amazon will be paying Microsoft an undisclosed amount of money as part of the arrangement.

Recently, OStatic covered Eucalyptus, an open source infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon's EC2, using the Amazon command-line tools directly. We've also been covering several interesting projects focused on cloud computing.

"A few days ago Google announced its App Engine, which lets folks build applications that run in Google’s cloud. Amazon has for a while had a number of services to let folks run applications in Amazon’s cloud. But in both of these cases, one must use their proprietary APIs. [...] I think most would prefer not to be locked-in, that cloud providers instead sold commodity services.

Virtualization is a key enabling technology for the modern datacenter. Without virtualization, tricks like load balancing and multitenancy wouldn't be available from datacenters that use commodity x86 hardware to supply the on-demand compute cycles and networked storage that powers the current generation of cloud-based Web applications.