OStatic

Open source software has been on the rise at many businesses during the extended economic downturn, and one of the areas where it is starting to offer companies a lot of flexibility and cost savings is in cloud computing, GigaOm reports. Open source cloud deployments can cut costs, free businesses from vendor lock-ins that can cause major problems over time, and more. GigaOm offers a collection of over 10 open source cloud resources, services, support options and more. Check it out here.

Just as open source itself has gathered more interest during the economic downturn because of the cost savings it can offer businesses, cloud computing is getting more attention because it can allow businesses to take advantage of IT infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go model. Increasingly, there is an intersection between these two trends: the open source cloud. Ignacio Martin Llorente has a very good roundup of the tools available at this intersection--open source resources that can let businesses customize their own cloud infrastructures. Here are some of his good citations, and several of our own.

Joyent has announced that it has agreed to acquire Reasonably Smart, a fledgling open cloud startup based on JavaScript and Git, for an undisclosed amount, reports GigaOm. While on the surface it might look like simple industry consolidation, Reasonably Smart?s technology will in fact help Joyent compete with emerging service-centric clouds while retaining an open model that makes developers comfortable, says Alistair Croll. Joyent's CEO says that his company gets an open platform with which to attract developers while preparing the company for the looming threat of Google and Microsoft. He's pledging to keep his offering completely open source. Check out more at GigaOm.

In conjunction with the Facebook Developers Conference going on today, Sun, Joyent and Facebook have announced that they've partnered to provide free scalable, on-demand infrastructure from Joyent to Facebook developers. According to a Joyent post: Joyent?s Accelerator on-demand infrastructure (peered with Facebook?s datacenter) provides the very best load balancers, routing and switching fabric, x86 servers and storage from Sun. Facebook developers can take advantage of Joyent Accelerators to quickly launch Facebook applications capable of scaling to millions of users. All for free.