ReadWriteCloud

Last month we asked you what you thought the most over-hyped cloud technology was.

The results are in.

What's over-hyped and why? Read on.

Remember last week when we mentioned that Clojure may be the new hot programming language of the moment? That idea just got a bit more support today as Heroku announced support for Clojure. Clojure joins Ruby and more recently Node.js on Heroku's platform-as-a-service.

Clojure is a dialect of Lisp and runs on the Java Virtual Machine. It was created to give Lisp programmers a modern environment for development. It's a general purpose programming language but it's selling point is functional programming. According to the Heroku blog post, "Clojure covers a new use case on the Heroku platform: components which demand correctness, performance, composability; and optionally, access to the Java ecosystem."

There's been a surge in platform-as-a-service providers in the past year, but many of them remain in private beta. Today one more is open to the public: DotCloud.

DotCloud supports PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, Node.JS, MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Solr, MongoDB and PostgreSQL. Like many other PaaSes, it runs on Amazon Web Services.

A recent report from Gartner details a spike the firm observed in the number of search queries for the term "PaaS" from users of its website. Independent researcher Louis Columbus summarizes the report on his blog. He notes that at Gartner, search terms are considered a leading indicator of future IT spending.

The number of searches for PaaS on Gartner.com spiked from around 250 in December to over 700 in January, and have remained between 650-700 in February and March.

As platform-as-a-service providers spring up, one area that's been sorely missing is support for functional programming and actor-based programming languages. Clojure, Erlang and Haskell are popular development environments, but these programming paradigms are being left out of the PaaS stack (though yes, you can do functional programming in languages like Python).

Perhaps Cloud Foundry's announcement that it will support Scala and the Lift framework and will be a turning point.

Heroku, the platform-as-a-service provider that Salesforce.com acquired last year, has added Node.js to its existing Ruby offering as part of its new public beta called Celadon Cedar. Other new features include consolidated logging, real-time dynotype monitoring and instant roll-backs.

The first question asked at the post-acquisition press and analyst Q&A was how long it would be until Heroku/Salesforce.com had a Node.js PaaS. We now have our answer.

Consolidation has been one of the main trends of 2011. In December of last year, Salesforce.com acquired Ruby PaaS Heroku and, Hat acquired Java PaaS Makara and CloudBees acquired Stax Networks. That lead to much speculation about the future of PaaS consolidation. But the real consolidation action in 2011 has been in telcos acquiring infrastructure-as-a-service companies. Meanwhile companies like VMware have decided to build instead of buy PaaS companies.

Today GigaOm's Derrick Harris broke the news that dotCloud is acquiring DuoStack. It seems that this sort of acquisition is a long time coming.

Following a private beta, the platform-as-a-service (hosted on Amazon Web Services) PHP Fog is now generally available following a private beta. It has a free option offering 100MG of storage, a single domain name and 15GB of bandwidth. Paid plans start at $29 a month.

A few months ago, PHP PaaSes were rare. PHP Fog competed with Orchestra and few others. But in recent weeks VMware and Red Hat have announced new PaaS offerings that include PHP support. Still, given the popularity of PHP-based applications like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, there could be room for several PHP platforms on the market.

Google App Engine now supports Go, the programming language developed by Google for scaling applications and multi-processor systems.

This is one of a number of features in Google App Engine 1.5, announced today at Google I/O.

Today Red Hat announced two new services: CloudForms, a cloud management product for private and hybrid clouds and OpenShift, a multiple platform-as-a-service. CloudForms is now acceping beta sign-ups and OpenShift is open for non-production use.

Surprisingly, Red Hat is not yet open-sourcing the code used to create these services, but according to RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady the company promises to release OpenShift's code in the future.