ReadWriteWeb

WordPress has grown by leaps and bounds from its origins as a personal blogging platform. Despite the evidence, though, a lot of folks view WordPress as a CMS that's exclusively for blogs or small sites. So what if I told you eMusic is moving to WordPress for all its CMS needs? That's exactly what Scott Taylor talked about this year at WordCamp San Francisco.

Now, eMusic isn't the world's biggest site, but it's nothing to sneeze at either. It serves around 6 million visits per month and "billions of HTTP requests" and millions of page views. The site has 400,000 subscribers. If it can handle eMusic, odds are it can handle your site as well.

Last March, a new company called Gemini Mobile Technologies initiated an innovative, cloud-hosted database platform service, where objects are stored in Gemini's cloud and customers pay only for the space consumed. That service is now called Cloudian; and earlier this week, Gemini took the second step toward achieving competitive par with big names like Oracle Database Cloud Service.

Thanks to a new partnership between Gemini and the community supporting OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, developers building applications for OpenStack can utilize the existing API for Amazon S3, the cloud storage access platform, to connect those applications with Cloudian multi-tenant NoSQL databases.

When you're developing services in the cloud, you often deploy them directly from your development environment - in the case of Windows Azure, from Visual Studio. When your services involve massive files like videos, those services will need to support what the cloud calls binary large objects, a phrase created just so we can call them BLOBs. Inevitably, you will find yourself having to manage BLOBs. Writing one-off programs just to send commands to the cloud service to manage your files, isn't exactly the way self-service should work.

Amazon is now offering hosting for static Web sites through S3. It makes it possible now for people with blogs and static Web sites to get the power of Amazon Web Services performance.

Its first customer? Amazon CTO Werner Vogels.

Often appearing on lists of "must have" Mac software, the open source FTP, SFTP, and WebDAV client Cyberduck announced a new version yesterday that gives the tool even more file management features, including support for Google Storage and file versioning in Amazon S3.

New features include integration of Access Control List editing for Amazon S3 and Google Storage so that permissions can be granted to different users. Using Cyberduck alongside Google Storage, for example, one can limit access to files based on whether a user is logged in to a Google Account and authenticated against the ACL.

Despite Amazon's leadership and market share in cloud computing, many in the industry have been reluctant to crown Amazon S3's API as the standard, arguing it's too early and too vendor-specific.

And while the former may still be true, the latter could be addressed with yesterday's announcement by Red Hat that the company is open-sourcing its Deltacloud API. More importantly, perhaps, Red Hat has contributed Deltacloud to the Apache Software Foundation where it is currently an incubator project. This moves the API out of the control of a single vendor and under the supervision of an external governing body.

Even if your data is "in the cloud," it's still housed somewhere. And as we've written about before, the location of cloud providers and data centers can be an important factor in performance, as ideally you want to route and store data through the server that's the closest.

In preparation for the launch of its new backup and migration tool, Turnkey Linux has done some work to automate selection of the nearest regional data center.

A couple of weeks ago, we asked on ReadWriteCloud's weekly poll if you thought that Amazon S3's API should be considered as the standard for data storage. Almost 50% of respondents indicated that yes, it should be. 23% thought "maybe," but wanted to see other companies weigh in first, and roughly 17% said that "no, there are better options out there." And 11% responded that they don't believe an API standard is necessary at this time.

One of the lingering problems with adoption of cloud computing has been the issue of facilitating access - both for the end-user and for the IT professional.

In a move that addresses these concerns, Amazon Web Services announced yesterday that it had added support for Bucket Policies. These policies will provide a single mechanism for managing access to the Amazon S3 buckets and for the objects stored in them. These policies are expressed using Amazon's Access Policy Language, which will centralize and refine permissions management.

Interoperability remains one of the key barriers to the adoption of cloud computing. As businesses, governments, schools and individuals move to the cloud, how can we be sure the data we store there doesn't find itself quarantined, stuck in one format and out of the reach of other services?