Many times in discussions about Cloud computing, the hybrid Cloud – meaning a service that combines both off-site public Cloud and on-premises private Cloud computing resources – is thought of as being some nirvana state that will be the dominant architecture at some point in the future.

Amazon Web Services has finally received certification under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, which the company said will lower the cost of implementing its cloud services among government organizations and agencies in the U.S.

There have been rumors and speculation. There have been whispers and rumblings. But this week VMware is expected to release details about its plans to launch a public Ccloud offering, the central part of its new hybrid Cloud strategy.

Newvem, which sells a tool that allows users to track and optimize their use of cloud computing resources, has expanded its software's functionality to monitor not just Amazon Web Services, but now Microsoft Azure now as well.

Usually Amazon Web Services, which many consider to be the leader in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud computing market, is pretty hush-hush about the internal workings of its massive cloud.

If you avoid some gotchas and keep a close eye on resource usage, you can have a handy server in the Amazon cloud for free

Who is Amazon's biggest competitor in the cloud?

Ah, Amazon -- did Jeff Bezos choose that name to symbolize the largest bookstore in the world or did he realize that he would one day create an enterprise Cloud service that was as large and complex as the river basin? After spending some time with his enterprise infrastructure service, I think he saw this coming.

There's been a lot of discussion the past couple of days about an analysis by Guy Rosen, in which he estimates that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is provisioning 50K EC2 server instances per day. He created this estimate by examining EC2 resource IDs and doing a time-series analysis on how much the IDs are incremented per hour.