OStatic

When North Bridge Partners did its Future of Open Source Survey earlier this year, and respondents were asked which trends are having the greatest impact on commercial open source players, Software as a Service (Saas) was ranked number one. Cloud computing, which is inextricably linked with SaaS, was also ranked very highly. As more and more people favor online hosted applications, the world of open source has to respond, and it already is. In this post, you'll find several good resources on cloud and SaaS solutions as they relate to open source.

Red Hat is hosting an Open Source Cloud Computing Forum event all day next Wednesday, July 22nd. It will take place in webinar format, so anyone is free to attend online, although you must register here. Sessions will also be available online after the event, for playback. The roster of speakers looks very impressive, and it looks like the discussions won't focus solely on Red Hat's own cloud efforts. There are top representatives from cutting-edge open source cloud players such as Eucalyptus Systems and Cloudera, for example.

While it may be a completely philosophical debate whether the universe is turtles all the way down, it's a lot less existential to imagine that the internet is clouds all the way up. In April, Canonical previewed its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (affectionately known as UEC), a system designed to simplify the creation, optimization, and management of cloud environments for private organizations. The interface and functionality of UEC is similar to the Amazon EC2 infrastructure, uses in-house hardware running Ubuntu Server Edition 9.04, and is powered by Eucalyptus Systems cloud computing tools.

Today Canonical officially launched the UEC service, including generalized tech support, consultancy and deployment services. Although UEC support is a joint offering from Eucalyptus Systems and Canonical, the Canonical team will act as the primary contact point in order to simplify and streamline support transactions.