ReadWriteCloud

The rapid migration by U.S. government agencies to cloud-based architectures is producing radical, and potentially beneficial, changes to these agencies' management structures. Costs are coming down, and as some agencies are just now realizing, security and resiliency could be going up. But the very concept of cloud infrastructure is something that legislators have yet to become familiar with.

So another long-debated piece of cybersecurity legislation will enter the next round of what has become an annual event: As The Hill reports this morning, Sen. Joe Lieberman's (I - Conn.) cybersecurity bill is likely to make another appearance this week in the Homeland Security Committee which he chairs.

Word is that Red Hat refused to sign on to OpenStack when it was announced, because it didn't like the governance model. Red Hat also has its own cloud management software projects. But the company that once dismissed OpenStack seems to be coming around. Look closely at the OpenStack community and you'll find quite a few Red Hat engineers, including some that have become core contributors to OpenStack projects.

Microsoft announced it had partnered with Cloud.com to support Hyper-V with OpenStack in October 2010. This was not long after the land-rush of companies clamoring to announce their support for OpenStack in the wake of its unveiling at OSCON 2010. It appears, though, that the folks in Redmond have lost interest in giving its customers support for using Windows Server Hyper-V to deploy OpenStack.

HP began its OpenStack-based Cloud Services this month, and there is a lot of promise but not much in the way of actual implementation yet. HP intends its cloud to cover both public and hybrid uses. Initially, the beta is free of charge although you will need to provide a credit card number for authentication (you won't be charged anything while the beta is underway).

On tap for today, we've got a new jQuery Mobile release, a look at Tendril Connect, and the latest BitNami Stack for Ruby on Rails.

jQuery Mobile 1.0.1 Released – The jQuery Mobile folks have pushed 1.0.1 out the door. This fixes a bunch of issues and adds Samsung's Bada platform and Dolphin browser to the "officially supported" list. See the post for a full list of supported platforms and their "grades." If you're using iOS, Android and newer BlackBerry devices you should be fine.

FireHost is expanding and offering European services, Dell is letting its customers have Linux their way, and EnterpriseDB wants to "cloudify" PostgreSQL.

FireHost's European-Based Secure Cloud Hosting Services Go Live – FireHost has announced an expansion into Europe, with services through data centers in London and Amsterdam.

One thing you can plainly say about Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: You know where he stands, and he's never on the fence. Over the past two years, one of Benioff's key themes at conferences and speeches is how software design, as part of the inevitable journey of all software to the cloud, is embracing the concepts of social networking. Facebook, he professes, is a lesson in itself.

Then last August at the Dreamforce conference, Salesforce kicked the evolution of its Chatter platform into overdrive. Chatter is the communications layer that's integrated into its cloud-based CRM platform, but which is open for other developers to utilize as well - not freely, mind you, but by way of extending the Salesforce ecosystem. In a demonstration for RWW, Salesforce's director of product marketing for Chatter, Dave King, revealed elements of the platform that showed the direction Salesforce is intending for it - as clear and unmistakable a direction as a theme in a Marc Benioff speech: Chatter has already become a social network for business, and we're just now waking up to that fact.

On the surface, it would seem to make sense that management is a task best performed in an organization by managers. When you apply that ethic to the emerging structure of data centers, which now use virtualization and private cloud foundations, you realize there are changes that can be made. Casting business resources as cloud services moves the budgeting process from capital expenditures to operating expenditures. And for more organizations, it means relocating management responsibilities from IT administration to a newly combined resource administration.

For these managers newly tasked with administering clouds along with people, admin tools don't make much sense. In a sweeping restructuring of its key virtualization management tools suite this morning, VMware is introducing a completely renovated dashboard for monitoring virtual data center operations, with graphs and 100-point-scale ratings designed to make better sense to people who might not, at first glance - or even second - know what any of this means.

We haven't written much about TIBCO's enterprise social media tool tibbr since a year ago. But they have interesting news, including updates to the service, that they are announcing today with v3.5, scheduled to be available next month.

Craigslist loves Perl, Amazon wants to help customers use geo-blocking, and if you're looking for an overview of Hadoop solutions then we've got a good link for you.

Geo-Blocking Content With Amazon CloudFront – Geo-targeting has its good and bad side. I'll let you decide where geo-blocking content falls. If it's something your company needs to do, though, Amazon has a short post by Nihar Bihani of the CloudFront team on using geo-blocking for content with CloudFront.