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To abuse the cloud metaphor, there's a storm brewing over public and private clouds. Not surprisingly, providers of public clouds (who hope to see everybody move their computing to public clouds) are quick to dismiss private clouds. One of the best reads today is from the ActiveState blog, where Bart Copeland takes on the idea that private clouds are "vapor." Also, OpenStack's usage accounting system is coming into shape and why you can't live migrate VMs between Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.2 to 6.1.

Cory Doctorow's "keynote to the Chaos Computer Congress" and follow-up post (Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing) on BoingBoing raise the alarm about keeping the Internet and PC "free and open." Doctorow makes excellent points and if you haven't watched the keynote or read his essay, you should do so right away.

I'm generally in agreement with Doctorow, but I'm not really sure that he goes quite far enough with Lockdown. Doctorow's focus on the copyright war we're facing with things like SOPA and PROTECT-IP is well warranted, but I'm not sure it covers everything.

If you’re using WordPress, the options you are mostly likely to use are to run your own stack, use a shared hosting provider that offers WordPress or to go with WordPress.com. With the rise of PaaS offerings like OpenShift, though, why not run WordPress there?

As it stands, most PaaS providers are largely targeted at custom code rather than packages like WordPress. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get WordPress up and running, as Amit Shah demonstrated by moving his WordPress blog to OpenShift.

Here's an interesting post from ActiveState's Jan Dubois on running Bugzilla on their Stackato PaaS. It's not a quite as simple as running on your own server, but Dubois does a good job of explaining the steps.

The process Dubois outlines includes:

When Windows Azure was launched in 2008, it was with the intention, Microsoft said, of running .NET Framework applications from the cloud. What ended up happening was that the PaaS market matured much faster than anyone in 2008 could have anticipated, so any cloud apps platform that needs to stay competitive must run with the languages the development world is using.

Hosted JavaScript certainly was in Microsoft's original plans, but JavaScript that runs as a host, was not. For a company that has historically been incapable of turning on a dime, though, it's executing a pretty impressive course change with Azure. Last June, the company helped the Joyent open source team to port its Node.js stand-alone JavaScript server to Windows. And yesterday, Microsoft announced it has completed its addition of Node.js support to Azure, meaning that any developer can launch a server-based JavaScript app from Microsoft's cloud in minutes.

This is a new one on me. I've heard of tree huggers, but Patrick Thibodeau's piece in ComputerWorld today is the first time I've run into server hugger. What's a server hugger, you ask?

According to Thibodeau, it's a term coined by Forrester analyst James Staten, for IT folks who "have significant concerns about their ongoing value to the company if they don't run [IT systems] themselves." Does the term fit, or is it perhaps a wee bit early to be labeling IT folks who haven't put all their eggs in the cloud basket?

PostgreSQL is getting a lot of love from cloud providers this year. It was the first RDBMS chosen for OpenShift, and VMware gave the elephant a big squeeze earlier this year as the platform for its "database as a service." Now Heroku is launching PostgreSQL as a standalone service.

Folks using Heroku as their PaaS have been able to make PostgreSQL their database of choice for some time. What's new here is that Heroku is letting people sign up for PostgreSQL services without using the rest of the Heroku platform. So if you're hosting some kind of app on AWS or your own server, you can tap Heroku for the database alone.

The prospects for virtual desktop technologies include the ability for office workers to utilize their business assets from just about anyplace, including their tablets, without transporting those assets directly into mobile devices and exposing them to security dangers. Already, businesses are saving millions by reducing the number of servers they would have deployed to host operating systems. And cloud-based developer platforms are helping businesses deploy new and dynamic applications with less overhead and reduced time to maturity.

At least that's what the mimeograph machine has been repeating up to now, and that's the message that's been repeated here and elsewhere. But yesterday's Q4 Forrester TechRadar status report for cloud computing paints a darker picture for VDI and PaaS, claiming vendors are attempting new business models for these technologies that prospective customers may be rejecting.

If you are looking for a way to move your .NET app into the cloud, then you probably have heard of Apprenda by now. We covered their launch earlier this year, and today they have v3 available.

New features included in Apprenda 3.0 are support for nearly any .NET web or SOA application by way of its software layer that enterprises can use quickly and easily. Apprenda has beefed up its APIs and included ones for distributed caching, publish/subscribe systems, message brokering, and application metering. All to make building more complex apps easier.