LAS VEGAS -- Services providers that have traditionally offered infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds are beginning to move up the stack into the platform as a service (PaaS) market in an effort to diversify their portfolio and respond to increasing customer demand for cloud-based development services.

In a pairing of unlikely partners, Piston Cloud Computing announced it will work to support integration of VMware's open source platform-as-a-service offering Cloud Foundry with OpenStack, the open source infrastructure-as-a-service model.

For many MySQL database admins, Amazon Web Services represents the brave new world of cloud computing -- one fraught with disappearing servers, disk I/O variability, and other shared resource challenges, not to mention questions regarding the security of data.

Amazon Web Services last April suffered what many consider to be the worst cloud service outage to date - an event that knocked big name customers such as Reddit, Foursquare, HootSuite, Quora and others offline, some for as many as four days.

If your data is in the cloud, do you know where it really is?

At an Amazon Web Services summit event in New York City on Thursday, Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels said one of the core philosophies related to the company's market-leading suite of infrastructure as a service products is that customers should be able to opt out whenever they want.

Symform co-founder and President Praerit Garg says there's something wrong with the way data is being stored in public clouds today, namely that public cloud providers rely on data centers, which are expensive and have inherent security risks.

Rackspace has unveiled an "early access" limited-availability edition of its updated public cloud environment, built on the open source cloud platform OpenStack. Dubbed simply Rackspace Cloud, its features include cloud servers, databases, block storage, networks, and monitoring, as well as a new control panel.