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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is opening a new data center in Tokyo, its fifth overall and second in Asia.

The new AWS data center is noteworthy as we are seeing a number of new initiatives to open data centers in countries around the world that provide an infrastructure with the capability to scale up and down. Korea Telecomm recently worked with Cloudscaling to develop a multi-tenant infrastructure. And at the Parallels Summit last week, I met people who are developing data centers in Cameroon, Spain and other parts of the world that have multi-tenant architectures.

Object-based storage is gaining in popularity and is increasingly viewed as a core requirement for multi-tenant infrastructures. Its strength is in its capability to handle unstructured data, which is far more prevalent these days than structured data.

Amazon Web Services and Rackspace offer object-based storage. But outside the narrow field of massive infrastructure plays, there is a growing space for services that hosting providers integrate into their own environments so they may compete more effectively in the market.

Scality is an emerging hot company in the cloud-based storage space. Today it announced a $7 million "B" round. The money will go to opening a sales and service office in New York and the extension of its core services for data center environments.

Amazon Web Services is on an aggressive development cycle. Its latest announcement comes today with what it calls AWS CloudFormation, a service that Amazon's Jeff Barr describes in a manner that makes it feel quite similar to cloud management technologies such as Puppet and Chef.

Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk launched last week. The platform-as-a-service (PaaS) points to the increasing popularity of platform services.

Elastic Beanstalk supports Java. It will include support for additional languages and application environments in the future.

Referencing Jack's magic beanstalk that just kept growing and growing, Amazon Web Services launched its first platform-as-a-service today: Elastic Beanstalk. Initially, AWS will only support Java, but the company plans to add support for other languages and application environments in the future. For example, Engine Yard is working with AWS to bring its Ruby on Rails stack to Elastic Beanstalk.

Elastic Beanstalk is available at no additional charge to AWS customers, and can be used with the AWS Free Usage Tier.

Amazon Web Services announced today that it's reducing the cost of existing premium support plans by 50% and adding two new support options to its selection of plans. The existing Gold and Silver options will be complimented by a new low-cost Bronze option and a high-end Platinum option. The basic support plan is not changing.

This is obviously good news for existing AWS customers. However, competitors like GoGrid, Joyent and RackSpace include 24/7 support with all plans. The additional cost for support can make AWS significantly more costly than other solutions.

As 2010 draws to a close we're taking a look at a few cloud startups that show promise and that we haven't covered on ReadWriteCloud.

Loggly is a cloud-based log management service for system administrators, application developers and data analysts. Loggly can collect logs from multiple servers and aggregate them into one searchable location. The San Francisco based company was founded in 2009 and is funded by Trinity Ventures and True Ventures.

Yesterday Amazon Web Services sent out a promotional email titled "Amazon Web Services Year in Review." Understandably, the email didn't mention one of the biggest AWS stories of the year: the company's decision to remove the WikiLeaks website from its servers.

Dave Winer noticed something else of note in the email: a paragraph about how the U.S. Federal Government is one of AWS's customers, with over 20 federal agencies taking advantage of the company's services. And, according to the announcement, that number is growing. Winer suggests this is the reason that Amazon.com closed WikiLeaks' account. "It makes perfect sense that the US government is a big customer of Amazon's web services. It also makes perfect sense that Amazon wouldn't want to do anything to jeopardize that business," Winer wrote. "There might not have even been a phone call, it might not have been necessary."

Amazon Web Services will be providing the ability to export VMware virtual machines in addition to an import features that it announced last week.

According to the AWS Web site, exporting will be available to common image formats.

The ability to export VMware images is a welcome one. The lack of an export features has been the source of some criticism over the past week.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) importing VMware images is a bit like the Hotel California. You can check in but you can never leave.

That's VMware's view about AWS importing VMware virtual machines. Without any real export features, AWS is locking in customers that want to extend its virtualized infrastructure to a public cloud environment.

Matthew Lodge is senior director of cloud services for VMware. We caught up with him this week to talk about VMware's approach and how it differs to AWS.