Google Inc. has announced its plan to move away from a custom-made Linux version as the default image type for Google Compute Engine to Debian.

The British telco has started expanding its platform to new markets across the globe. Recently crowned with the third biggest infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider in the world, BT announced on Monday that the telecom giant is adding new markets to its target by launching its BT Cloud Compute services. These countries include India, Germany, Mexico, China and Argentina.

Linux giant Red Hat is pushing open source cloud with its recently launched community powered OpenStack distribution which is an open source cloud platform. The free community supported distribution - RDO - was announced at the OpenStack summit on Monday.

Enterprises, small businesses or individuals who do not want to rely on cloud vendors like Amazon or Hewlett-Packard can now set up their own private cloud system, thanks to the launch of a new hardware version of OpenStack called Nebula One, made available by US based startup called Nebula.

Cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions company Savvis has introduced Savvis ClientConnect, an online gateway for businesses to accelerate their growth by generating new revenue opportunities.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), a group of volunteers that oversees nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, has announced that the Apache CloudStack had gone on from the Apache Incubator stage to become a Top-Level Project (TLP). The latter is an open source, turn-key platform used for delivering full-featured Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.

Even though servers are designed for load balancing, at times they crash due to unexpected sudden spikes. Dynamic load balancing becomes all the more important in such scenarios. GoGrid now offers Software-Defined Networking based Dynamic Load Balancer to overcome this problem. The company provides a cloud-based load-balancing service to design and manage high-availability infrastructure.

Cloudscaling, an elastic cloud infrastructure software company has rolled out Open Cloud System (OCS) 2.0 to help its clients to run their own on-premise elastic cloud infrastructure and configure computing capacity with minimum efforts. OCS 2.0 has been developed on OpenStack technology for public or private deployments.

Here’s some good news for Startups. The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) company ProfitBricks has announced that under its recently launched programme for Startups, it shall provide virtual data centres, featuring the industry's first user-defined network configurations, at a considerably reduced cost for a year.

First, the news. Cloud based storage application Bitcasa just went public from beta. Then, the implications. Will Bitcasa, a paid app, be a game-changer as some digital experts seem to believe? All of us by now are quite familiar with cloud based storage and virtual servers. We all know of Dropbox, for example, that allows you to store all your important content online, free to a certain limit, paid thereafter, to be recalled at a moment’s notice.