"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.

According to reports online today, and a release, Union Square Ventures, the venture firm that funded such names as Del.icio.us, FeedBurner, Etsy and Twitter, is investing $1.5 million in open source cloud computing service 10gen. 10gen's software stack is roughly comparable to Google App Engine "in that it provides a new stack of tools (database, grid management, application server) that are purpose-built to run in a cloud environment," according to the company. An alpha version of the company's platform SDK is available now as a free download.

Plumbing is what cloud computing is all about. Your company will likely be using cloud computing techniques to manage computing resources very soon if you aren't already. These concepts apply equally well to big enterprise and small startups, companies that own their infrastructure and those that choose to use services like Amazon EC2 or Mosso. Puppet offers a great system automation framework, but how do you get up and running with those systems? That's where Enomalism comes in.