The idea of integrating online services, especially the sort that are (poorly, IMHO) referred to as "cloud computing", is met with resistance by some. Here are my thoughts as they currently stand on what those commitments should be for a service to be considered "Free as in Freedom":

This article shows you how to use Apache Hadoop to build a MapReduce framework to make a Hadoop Cluster and how to create a sample MapReduce application which runs on Hadoop. You will also learn how to set up a time/disk-consuming task on the cloud.

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.

In the last two years, the term "cloud computing" has infiltrated the mainstream press (although the concept has existed for years). More and more businesses are embracing this way of thinking about information technology. And if the seminar circuit is any evidence, the legal world has awoken to the myriad challenges of cloud computing.

Fashion is fickle. One day thin clients and clusters are the fashion de jour, the next it's Web 2.0, Virtualisation or distributed computing and Grids. They who live by the sword of fashion will surely perish by it but a new model has been strutting its stuff along the catwalk of web fashion and she goes by the name of Cloud Computing.

Why the demise of proprietary software is creating a vacuum which is about to be filled... and we may not like it.

Barton George caught up with Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth in this podcast to discuss Ubuntu and cloud computing. George is a Sun Microsystems veteran who now works at Lombardi Software and also maintains his own blog, BartonGeorge.net.