Today, Yahoo moved its open source cloud computing initiatives up a notch with the donation of its Traffic Server product to the Apache Software Foundation. Traffic Server is used in-house at Yahoo to manage its own trafic and it enables session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for entire cloud computing stacks.

According to reports online today, and a release, Union Square Ventures, the venture firm that funded such names as Del.icio.us, FeedBurner, Etsy and Twitter, is investing $1.5 million in open source cloud computing service 10gen.

VMware is poised Tuesday to further redefine its cloud strategy by buying Yahoo's Zimbra open source messaging business in order to expand its stake in the platform-as-a-service market. Zimbra, bought by Yahoo in 2007 for $350 million, is an open source messaging platform popular on the Linux and Mac OS platforms and with universities and service providers.

Clearly, the underlying technology of cloud computing will be based on open source software--that is, if the three cloud infrastructure hopefuls addressing a standing room-only crowd of more than 350 venture capital firms, large company CTOS and CIOs, and other cloud hopefuls--are as successful in their efforts as the show’s judges and audience anticipated.

One of the companies that we have been collaborating with on some of the features for the Phoronix Test Suite has been CloudHarmony, which is a company that seeks to provide an assortment of information on different cloud computing platforms and offerings from the various firms.

2010 is definitely the year of the cloud, The IT world is abuzz with the benefits of cloud computing and rightfully so. Cloud computing, the logical extension of network storage and virtualization, is probably the biggest IT leap forward since pervasive use of the Internet. Despite the buzz all that glitters isn’t gold.

Web developers may believe that, in order to use cloud computing, they must accept limitations in the way they write and build their applications. But that view is a misconception; open standards for cloud computing are already in place and are being tweaked.

You've picked the perfect cloud computing platform for your needs, and you have a well-designed application to run on it. The hard part is done, right? Not so fast. You still need to consider all the things you'd typically worry about if the application was for your own servers: deployment, testing, and monitoring.

But here’s the zillion-dollar question: Is Cloudera really the next hot open source start-up, perhaps a nascent XenSource (bought by Citrix for a gorgeous $500 million)? Or will it be just another fledgling rushing into the crowded cloud computing sector?