Skytap automates cloud deployments

In many ways, the weakest link in cloud computing is the network. No matter how powerful your cloud hardware and software are, they’re useless without a secure and flexible network to hold the different pieces of the cloud together.

A newly rechristened Cloud.com on Tuesday unveiled its CloudStack Platform, an integrated software solution that lets enterprises and service providers quickly and easily build, manage and deploy Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing solutions.

A newly rechristened Cloud.com on Tuesday unveiled its CloudStack Platform, an integrated software solution that lets enterprises and service providers quickly and easily build, manage and deploy Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing solutions.

Learn how to maintain trust and control in virtualized environments. How can you ensure that your sensitive data is protected in virtualized environments? How will you demonstrate the compliance of your cloud deployments?

Opscode's open source framework Chef is part of the orchestration layer of platform-agnostic software aimed at allowing developers to create a reproducible blueprint for server configuration and automation.

This week's open source cloud headlines highlight a few smaller open source projects and companies, including Blue Box and Orion. You'll also find more details on HP's cloud strategy, a new software-defined-networking feature for Rackspace cloud and an op-ed from Alfresco on the role of open source cloud in disrupting proprietary software vendors.

VMware announced a new version of its Linux-compatible VMware Workstation 8 software, designed to make it easier to build, share, and upload virtual machines (VMs) to cloud environments.

Zenoss released a new report this week that predicts more than 50 percent open source cloud adoption among enterprises within five years.  In other open source cloud news, Rackspace has a new training and certification program for OpenStack, Citrix is building its IaaS platform and CloudStack is looking for speakers at its November conference in Las Vegas.

HP and Microsoft are to jointly develop an appliance to run Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform that will enable enterprises to migrate their applications into the cloud and to easily manage these.