There's news out of Canonical today that the release of Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition -- codenamed Karmic Koala -- is just around the corner. It's the greenest release yet, with a heavy emphasis on power management and cloud computing tools.

Ubuntu 9.10 includes Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), a system designed to help users build and support private clouds. It's underlying technology relies on Eucalyptus, an open source infrastructure for implementing cloud computing on clusters.

Yesterday morning, Google's Gmail service went down for what the company claims was "a small subset of users." As GigaOm noted, when Gmail goes down, it disrupts many types of businesses, and it's often hard to fathom what is actually going on from Google's terse advisories. Yesterday's outage appeared to affect many users, at least judging by complaints and teeth-gnashing visible on Twitter.

This is a perfect example of why cloud computing is not as perfect as its many proponents claim it is, and why businesses will not just haphazardly keep all their data out in the cloud. Instead, I believe they will reach for combinations of in-cloud and out-of-cloud software solutions, just as many of us do individually. That concept leaves ample room for flexible, cloud-focused open source solutions.

On the heels of the launch and funding of open source cloud computing player Eucalyptus Systems, the company has now announced its first commercial product. The Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EEE) enables customers to implement an on-premise Eucalyptus cloud with VMware'VSphere virtualization platform, and ESX hypervisor.

VSphere is VMware's cloud operating system. Not only will Eucalyptus' EEE solution allow on-premise Eucalyptus clouds on VMware's platform, but it also supports other hypervisors, including Xen and KVM. With EEE, users can leverage all of these environments, and additonally develop applications compatible with Amazon's EC2.