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Free SimpleDB Beta Cloud from Amazon

For "at least" the next six months, Amazon will provide a certain amount of free cloud sitting. Every month, SimpleDB users will receive 25 machine hours, 1GB of data transfers in, 1GB of transfers out, and 1GB of storage at no charge. Once those freebies are exhausted, you'll pay $0.14 per machine hour, $0.10 per GB in, $0.10 to $0.17 per GB out, and $0.25 per GB of storage. Storage pricing is down 83 per cent from the cloud's limited beta.

Open Source and Community Clouds

StratusLab

StratusLab is an informal collaboration between CNRS/LAL, GRNET, SixSq Sarl, and UCM. The collaboration is open to anyone who would like to participate. The collaboration focuses on cloud technologies and how those technologies can be used productively in research and commercial environments.

Why clouds should be more like operating systems

Let's say you are running multiple different Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), which contain your applications, libraries, data and configuration settings on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and you are using Amazon's S3 for storage. Don't think running everything in the cloud will abstract away potential management problems. You'll still have a system administration headache until you script something or update your AMIs with your new software and application code.