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.

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.

Penguin Computing, a company that provides high-performance computing resources to researchers, scientists and engineers, has begun offering its services in the cloud. Penguin On Demand (POD) became available on Tuesday. The company said the service is intended for those who need HPC capabilities without having to acquire the clustered infrastructure required for that level of computing.

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.

Cloud computing is a concept. It is an architectural framework by which one or many organizations can deploy, manage and retract any workload, public or private. Cloud computing addresses business needs from a workload perspective.

Red Hat today officially launched an ambitious new effort called Deltacloud to help abstract away the differences between public and private cloud deployments. Oh and it's all open source too. The way that Red Hat CTO Briand Stevens explains Deltacloud, is that that it will have drivers that map onto Amazon EC@ as well as private clouds that uses VMware or Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Jim Whitehurst says clouds are fundamentally new infrastructure ripe for Linux innovation.

These days, everybody is talking about cloud computing, and many people use it in one form or the other. But popular cloud computing services are provided by a third party, which means that you store you data on a server somewhere, so that you can access it any time, from anywhere. But there are cloud applications that any person can use to host their own private cloud, from their home.

During their own Sept. 29 Cloud Computing Summit, IDC made what at first glance sounded like a self-defeating statement: clouds, in the long run, are actually a more expensive option than a company running its own datacenter.