Amazon recently announced the EC2 availability in Europe; this is a big announcement and Amazon is going to compete directly with Flexiscale in the European market.  Prior to this announcement, Amazon was only offering S3 storage services in Europe.  This will give additional choice to European and other non-US companies who want to leverage cloud computing but were reluctant to put data in the US datacenters due to concerns about the US privacy laws.  The cost of launching servers in EC2 Europe is about 10% higher than the cost of launching the EC2 servers in the US.  However, like the US EC2 offering the pricing for EC2 Europe is very competitive compared to other similar offerings.

On a different subject, Lori MacVittie published a very persuasive blog supporting the Application Centric approach we are promoting and implementing at Kaavo for managing the virtual resources.