Amazon Web Services just reported jaw-dropping growth in the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 year over year.

"As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times," AWS Evangelist Jeff Bar wrote on the company's blog tonight. The company reported 262 billion objects in storage in Q4 of 2010. "This represents year-over-year growth of 192%; S3 grew faster last year than it did in any year since it launched in 2006." Independent analysts say this is indicative of the growth of the cloud in general and of Amazon's striking dominance of the market.

If you are looking to virtualize some of your data center and host it in the cloud, you probably have heard about Amazon's EC2 by now. But one IT shop used EC2 as a strawman to consider what they really needed from their eventual service provider. It is interesting and instructive to see the steps that WoundVision took for this process. The company produces a risk assessment software solution supported by infrared thermal imaging for early wound detection.

Socrates: And you did not know, you never suspected, that they were goddesses?

Strepsiades: No, indeed; I thought the Clouds were only fog, dew and vapour.

(Aristophanes, The Clouds)

Billions of words have been written about "the cloud" and its benefits, implications, and challenges. Hundreds of vendors have sprung up or re-positioned themselves as cloud companies, and there is a vast amount of real business change underway. However, I have seen very little that explains for the layperson what is actually new about the cloud that makes it so interesting and important.



Organizations using Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud are now able to create network interfaces that exist separate from the EC2 instances. The upshot of this is that customers will be able to have a lot more flexibility in managing network interfaces for EC2 instances.

The new feature, Elastic Network Interface (ENI) is created automatically with an EC2 instance. However, unless you want to use any of the new features it will essentially behave just as before.

Cloud computing, it is often claimed, is a good way for companies to reduce their carbon footprint. The reality, as Tom Raftery explains on Greenmonk, is much more complicated than that.

In context, Raftery is writing about a pair of reports from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Verdantix. Raftery argues that "Cloud Computing – The IT Solution for the 21st Century" (PDF) and an addendum for France and the UK (PDF) are fundamentally flawed.

When Windows Azure was launched in 2008, it was with the intention, Microsoft said, of running .NET Framework applications from the cloud. What ended up happening was that the PaaS market matured much faster than anyone in 2008 could have anticipated, so any cloud apps platform that needs to stay competitive must run with the languages the development world is using.

Hosted JavaScript certainly was in Microsoft's original plans, but JavaScript that runs as a host, was not. For a company that has historically been incapable of turning on a dime, though, it's executing a pretty impressive course change with Azure. Last June, the company helped the Joyent open source team to port its Node.js stand-alone JavaScript server to Windows. And yesterday, Microsoft announced it has completed its addition of Node.js support to Azure, meaning that any developer can launch a server-based JavaScript app from Microsoft's cloud in minutes.

The latest entry into calculating cloud computing costs of the public providers is from Cloudsizer, with more than a dozen different cloud providers covered. It is simple and easy to use, and you can start out with a free trial of its "express" service immediately, and upgrade to a paid "pro" account for AU$300 for three months.

One of the drivers of the current cloud computing revolution was supposed to be cost reduction. Even private cloud implementers are supposed to be spending considerably less on storage and computing power, by virtue of greater utilization and tolerance for commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) components.

But a global survey of some 3,645 enterprise cloud computing users over the last two months, conducted by TNS for professional business services provider CSC reveals a pair of startling discoveries: First, while most businesses are saving money, the amount in most cases ranges from slim to none. Second, businesses aren't really put off too much by that fact.

This week two cloud-based services opened their doors. (Can a cloud open? Whatever.) One, myERP.com, purports to replace the likes of Quickbooks and Salesforce. The other, EazyBI.com, offers low cost analytics on a wide variety of metrics. Both are worthy of further study and are based on freemium models.