Red Hat's Deltacloud project is developing a open source standardised API for addressing different cloud architectures in a uniform way. Cloud service users can use the Deltacloud API to access Amazon's EC2 as well as private clouds that are based on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEL-V); drivers for private VMware ESX clouds and the cloud services offered by Rackspace are to follow.

Clouds continue to dominate my life, as they do (or will) many of yours. While major corporations try to convince us to rent space or resources on their clouds, it doesn't have to be expensive, and some services like Ubuntu One, offer some amount of free cloud storage. But public institutions can get in on the act as well, and seed their own clouds.

I've read a bit of angst about cloud lock-in, a lot of weed pulling in the form of interoperability standards for the cloud, and a manifesto or two about 'Open Cloud'. And in between, I've seen lots of interesting new tools for cloud computing, and lots of narratives about how the tools, combined with the formalization of use cases, pave the way for open clouds.

Backed by Microsoft, IBM, and three other outfits beckoning developers into the sky, Zend Technologies has unleashed an open source API for fashioning PHP apps that float on multiple clouds. Zend calls it the Simple API for Cloud Application Services.

Cloud architecture has to be defined in a way that allows applications to move around, or clouds can become the mother of all lock-ins, warned Red Hat's CEO James Whitehurst.

With the new year under way and all of the problems in the old year still largely unsolved, people in the IT sector are looking around for a little good news and some prospects for growth. There are a lot of clouds out there right now, and Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, thinks the rain is going to be good, particularly for Linux.

"We're creating a Cloud management engine based on the open source deltaCloud project," Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of Red Hat's Cloud business, told InternetNews.com. "We haven't yet issued a delivery date for that product, but it will be sometime next year.

The Meta Cloud is one step closer to meta-reality. Last week, at OSCON, a San Jose startup known as Cloudkick unveiled an open source project that hopes to provide a single programming interface for a host of so-called infrastructure clouds, including Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud Servers, Slicehost, and GoGrid.

This digest covers clouds, Windows, security, and a lawsuit over lock-in.