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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.

The latest release by CA Technologies of a product called Private Cloud Accelerator is being described, by folks who only read the press release and skipped the details, as a new catalog for rapidly provisioning and deploying services over a company's private cloud. But what's really nice for a prospective customer to have at a time like this, is a private cloud.

So the real news from CA today is actually this: By means of a partnership deal with Vblock infrastructure platform maker VCE, CA is making available an all-in-one, rapidly deployable private cloud package, both hardware and software, that competes directly with out-of-the-box solutions from IBM, HP and Oracle.

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 Liebermann'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.