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Cloud was still probably the most talked about topic this week at OSCon. Cloud computing is still in the process of changing the way we work and do business, but let's face it: many vendors and consultants are overhyping the benefits, and a lot of us are just getting a bit tired of hearing the word "cloud." Cloud hype's not going away any time soon, but we can at least vent a little about some of the particular technologies we think are exaggerated. Which one irks you the most?

Software giant CA Technologies has introduced a series of new and enhanced cloud management products today, including:

• CA Business Service Insight v8.0,
  
• CA Automation Suite for Clouds v1.0,
  
• CA Automation Suite for Datacenters v12.5,
  
• CA Virtual Placement Manager v1.0,
  
• CA AppLogic v3.0, and
  
• CA NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor v3.2
  

In VMware's earning call CEO Paul Maritz said that most customers costs won't be changed by the new pricing scheme for the company's updated vSphere product, reports CRN.

"We believe that 95 percent of customers will see no change in their licensing costs. From our calculations, most customers will see no change and won't be required to pay us more money," Maritz said during the call.

While cloud computing gains steadily in the U.S., U.K. and Germany (and rather slowly in Canada), it's taking off in emerging markets like Brazil, China and India. According to a study by GfK Custom Research, and covered by FineChannel,
cloud computing enjoys relatively high penetration rate in emerging markets, regardless of company size.

According to GfK, decision makers in Brazil, China and India have a much more positive view of cloud computing and cite cost-effectiveness, flexibility and security as the main benefits. In contrast, decision makers in the U.S. and the U.K. see security as a barrier rather than a strength, and view flexibility as the main advantage.

One of the themes many of us commentators harp on about is the fact that barriers to entry for application developers have never been lower - the availability of cloud hosting, agile development methodologies, even this crazy frothy investment cycle we're in all combine to see lots of applications being created.

One of the flip sides of al this app development is the corresponding drag on testing - that horrible stage that no one really likes, but everyone needs to do. One player looking to aid in that stage of the process is Soasta (rhymes with toaster!)

So you want to buy a tractor? Build a house? Scrabble? So do the more than 62 million other gamers who play Farmville daily. That's why keeping its communities humming 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and responding to issues in real-time is no game for Zynga.

To get the job done, the company turned to Vertica, which is now owned by HP. Says Ken Rudin, VP of Analytcs at Zynga: "With over 40 million players, 3TB of new data a day and 230 nodes spread across two clusters, Zynga's columnar data warehouse from Vertica is no analytical windup toy."

We have covered Google's Chromebook in a series of posts previously, including our story about questions to ask here and some other considerations here. But Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has written an excellent take on ZDnet here about what you need to know before deploying any of the Chromebooks across your enterprise.

According to data visualized in an infographic from Techvibes, Canada lags in cloud adoption with only 47% of Canadian business actively using cloud computing. By comparison, 70% of U.S. businesses, 68% of U.K. businesses and 61% of German businesses use cloud computing.

The number one reason for avoiding the cloud? Security concerns.

The intersection of cloud and mobile computing means the next generation of software will be available everywhere, but getting there won't be easy.

Although relatively new technology, cloud implementations have been quickly adopted on the Web, and spurred innovation by coinciding with the proliferation of mobile and tablet devices. We are moving away from software that exists on our hard drives to applications that exist both in the cloud and in our pockets. The future of software is in “everywhere apps” that aren’t tied to a single device, but rather to the end user - available on any platform the user prefers. We no longer expect to go to the software - we expect the software to come to us.

A new ebook to help users of Rackspace setup and manage their cloud-based servers is out this week. Called Managing Rackspace Cloud Servers and written by Jacek Artymiak, it is a very practical and useful guide, and seems to be unique.