Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, announced today the availability of Ingres Database 10, the latest version of the company's flagship open source database product.

I recently attended Open Source World, concurrent with Cloud World in San Francisco and naturally, a good place to converse on and consider the intersection of open source and cloud computing and what it means for vendors, customers and the software.

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.

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.

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and Ingres will offer a combination of Linux, JBoss middleware and the Ingres open source database as a new open source software stack to application developers around the world, the companies recently announced.

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.

I wrote recently about the potential of open source software as a platform for cloud computing. Since then I’ve been involved in a couple of conversations with prospective cloud users that have further highlighted the opportunity for an open source cloud.

There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. There are a bunch more that I failed to mention.

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.