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Rasmus Andersson, developer of sites such as Dropular and Spotnicc, has created a template for setting up an Amazon EC2 instance for running Node.js or other Web applications. You can use it save time setting up and deploying virtual servers while experimenting with new ideas.

The steps are outlined here and the template can be found Github here. It seems like a handy way to get up and running with Node.js.

Last month Gartner released its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting. The report positioned AT&T, Rackspace, Savvis, Terremark and Verizon as the leaders. Controversially, Amazon.com didn't make the cut as a leader partially because it doesn't offer certain features such as managed hosting or options for hybrid clouds. Amazon.com and many of the other providers ranked are focused on developers and on providing web services, not hosting virtualized enterprise applications such as ERP.

Yesterday we reported that Wikileaks' web site suffered a denial of service (DOS) attack just before the publication of its most recent cache of documents. The site was down for only a few hours, according to Forbes' Andy Greenberg.

Today, The Guardian reports that Wikileaks turned to Amazon.com's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service to get back online and survive the DOS attack.

Adrian Cockcroft, a cloud architect at Netflix, is running a series of posts looking at how different NoSQL databases handle common cloud computing tasks. All the usual disclaimers apply: SQL is good for some things, and different scenarios call for different NoSQL solutions. No one solution is necessarily "better" overall. However, as Cockcroft writes "We need a basis for comparison across them, so that we understand the differences in behavior."

Amazon.com is working closely with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to provide cloud computing services for the space agency's The Mars Exploration Rover project, NASA announced today. Although the release claims that this project is the first NASA space mission to use cloud computing for daily mission operations," NASA has used Amazon competitor Rackspace for its Nebula project. A paper called "A Scalable Image Processing Framework for Gigapixel Mars and Other Celestial Body Images" (PDF) goes into more detail on how JPL is using Amazon.com's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2).

Nimbula, the cloud operating system vendor founded by the developers of Amazon's EC2, announced today that it has secured $15 million in its second round of venture capital funding. This round was led by Accel Partners, with participation from Sequoia Capital, which led Nimbula's first VC round. The new funding brings the total raised for the company to over $20 million and will be used to expanding marketing and development of the company's hybrid cloud computing technologies.

Google Apps Engine has received a few new updates that include multitenancy capabilities, image serving and custom error messages.

The new features are part of the 1.3.6 release of App Engine for Java and Python. Google Apps Engine competes primarily with Amazon EC2. Other competitors include Windows Azure and Salesforce.com and its Force.com platform.

Amazon is providing users with the ability to run relational databases in the cloud. The service, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), means that customers now have another way to use a cloud service for a function normally administered by an IT department.

Werner Vogels, chief technology officer for Amazon, says the new service means that RDS customers will not have to deal with "the 'muck' of relational database management freeing up its users to focus on their applications and business." RDS will take care of the headaches such as patching and IT administration of the relational database.

Amazon announced today that it is bridging two of its web computing services, EC2 and S3, with Hadoop, an open-source project that brings the same distributed data processing power as Google's MapReduce. In fact, it is calling the new service Amazon Elastic MapReduce. The new service will allow its EC2 customers to perform distributed MapReduce queries on enormous datasets stored in S3, paying only for the computation time they need.

Amazon.com changed the retail world. In the process the company built up so much surplus computing power that it started a dirt cheap "computing in the cloud" business that changed the computing world. This week the company's newest project Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services began offering more than 1 Terabyte (1000 GB) of fascinating public data for developers to access on the fly through Amazon's cloud computing service.

We're talking about an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences, including the Human Genome, huge amounts of chemistry data, machine readable encyclopedic entries about millions of different topics and an entire dump of Wikipedia. US Census data, data from the US Department of Transportation and more. It's all accessible by web applications in no time at all. What do you think this is going to change?