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Amazon is looking to continue its rapid growth for S3. While hard drive costs are staying steady or going up due to limited supply, Amazon is actually dropping pricing for S3 storage.

The pricing changes were announced on the AWS blog yesterday. The first tier of storage starts at $0.125 a month per GB for the first 1TB of storage, then pricing drops to $0.11 per GB/month up to 50TB, and so on. Note that there's no change in pricing past the 4,000TB+ tier, so really heavy users of S3 (like Dropbox) aren't really going to see a lot of pricing relief from the change.

Need support for Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE Linux or Microsoft Windows on AWS? Amazon is now offering support for setup, configuration and troubleshooting of system software as part of its support program. The company is also adding a “trusted advisor” feature to inspect AWS environments and offer help ranging from performance improvements to security suggestions.

Word is that Red Hat refused to sign on to OpenStack when it was announced, because it didn't like the governance model. Red Hat also has its own cloud management software projects. But the company that once dismissed OpenStack seems to be coming around. Look closely at the OpenStack community and you'll find quite a few Red Hat engineers, including some that have become core contributors to OpenStack projects.

One of the nice things about following cloud technologies and virtualization? It's never boring, especially given how new cloud technologies are. That means that there's plenty of room for change, and ample speculation about where the industry is going. While we usually spend time reporting on what's just happened and the impact it will have in the near future, the end of the year gives us an opportunity to pull out the crystal ball and think about what's coming in the year ahead. In short, my forecast for 2012 calls for consolidation, continued domination of Amazon Web Services and scattered patent suits.

The latest entry into calculating cloud computing costs of the public providers is from Cloudsizer, with more than a dozen different cloud providers covered. It is simple and easy to use, and you can start out with a free trial of its "express" service immediately, and upgrade to a paid "pro" account for AU$300 for three months.

If customers won't come to Rackspace, then Rackspace will simply have to go to the customers. Rackspace announced today that it's going to be offering a "private edition" of OpenStack to companies looking to manage a private cloud.

Rackspace has long been known for its "fanatical support" of customers inside its datacenter, but is it ready to provide support outside its walls? Is OpenStack really ready for production use? I talked to Rackspace's Mark Collier today to try to find out.

If you have a Red Hat or CentOS server in your data center and you have been itching to try out one of the public cloud services, then be one of the first 100 people to try out this new migration tool from Racemi today. Click on this link here and set up a free account. You have your choice of clouds on Amazon EC2, GoGrid, Rackspace, or Terremark. If you miss the offer, Racemi will only charge for successful migrations.

OpenStack is going to be taking another major step in open governance next year. According to Rackspace, the time has come to form an OpenStack Foundation. Rackspace president Lew Moorman will be discussing an OpenStack Founation during the "state of the union talk" tomorrow at the OpenStack Conference in Boston.

Why now? Today I spoke with Rackspace's Mark Collier and Jonathan Bryce, and their response was that now is the time given the level of contributions from other companies.

Opscode is releasing new Cookbooks for rapid deployment and automation of OpenStack clouds. The new Cookbooks work with OpenStack's five core projects, including the new identity and dashboard projects announced in September.

The new Cookbooks for Chef were developed in conjunction with Rackspace and Dell, and are immediately available on GitHub.

Philosophically, the open source concept borrows some selected elements from socialism. It upholds a notion of the "common good," it eschews the appearance of authority or hierarchy, and it often frowns upon capitalizing on one's own work, insofar as being exclusive. In practice, however, open source projects may look less like Big Brother from 1984 and more like Big Brother from reality TV.

Joshua McKenty's still-young career is, compared to those of other capitalist executives, surprisingly replete. He's led development teams for the Netscape browser, and is intimately familiar with Netscape's successors at Mozilla. His next stroke of luck was with the space program, helping to create and then lead one of the world's most successful cloud computing projects, NASA Nebula. His work with NASA spawned the open source community's most successful - and perhaps most important - project in the last few years, the OpenStack cloud operating system - and he sits on that project's governing body. In-between jobs, he just happened to pioneer an earthquake modeling system for the World Bank.