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BitNami announced today that they're going to be offering ready-to-run images of popular open source stacks for a wider range of public and private clouds. Previously, BitNami's cloud images were only available for Amazon Web Services (AWS), but the company is now providing images for Eucalyptus, OpenStack, VMware vCloud and others.

Amazon is looking to continue its rapid growth for S3. While hard drive costs are staying steady or going up due to limited supply, Amazon is actually dropping pricing for S3 storage.

The pricing changes were announced on the AWS blog yesterday. The first tier of storage starts at $0.125 a month per GB for the first 1TB of storage, then pricing drops to $0.11 per GB/month up to 50TB, and so on. Note that there's no change in pricing past the 4,000TB+ tier, so really heavy users of S3 (like Dropbox) aren't really going to see a lot of pricing relief from the change.

Need support for Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE Linux or Microsoft Windows on AWS? Amazon is now offering support for setup, configuration and troubleshooting of system software as part of its support program. The company is also adding a “trusted advisor” feature to inspect AWS environments and offer help ranging from performance improvements to security suggestions.

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.

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.

Little bit of news around Node.js today, Amazon has added support for Identity Federation, and Oracle customers might want to pay attention to a fundamental flaw that's been discovered in Oracle database systems.

Node.js v0.6.8 – The Node.js team has released a new stable version, 0.6.8. This release updates V8 to 3.6.6.19, updates npm to 1.1.0-2, and fixes a number of bugs.

Amazon's Dynamo paper (PDF) is the paper that launched a thousand NoSQL databases, if you'll pardon a twisted metaphor and wee bit of exaggeration. The paper inspired, at least in part, Apache Cassandra, Voldemort, Riak and other projects. Now Amazon is making its own take on Dynamo, melded with SimpleDB, available for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels wrote about the new service this morning on his blog, saying that Amazon DynamoDB is "the result of 15 years of learning in the areas of large scale non-relational databases and cloud services."

The OpenStack community is getting ready for a bug-squashing day, BitNami has Windows AMIs that qualify for Amazon's free usage tier and Christopher Miles has an interesting post on working with Hadoop, HBase and Clojure.

All Your HBase Are Belong to Clojure – Miles goes into great detail on setting up HBase, defining the Hadoop job, and a lot more.

Amazon has offered a free tier to get customers hooked on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for some time, but customers were limited to the Linux Micro Instance. This week, Amazon is throwing in a free usage tier for Windows as well, so that developers can test out AWS with Windows Server. As an added bonus, Amazon has boosted the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) to 30GB and doubled the I/O requests to 2 million.

Specifically, if you want to make use of the free tier you can use one of three Windows AMIs: