July 29, 2011 — Cloud computing software developer 4PSA announced on Thursday it has released Business Zone API, a REST based web service that partners can use to access and automatically provision cloud services and software licenses. The move comes just a few weeks after 4PSA launched its new developer resource website.

A screenshot from the error page of HootSuite, one of the downed social media sites.

Web Hosting – SAN ANTONIO – Rackspace® Hosting, the world’s leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, today announced the availability of Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers. Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers provides operational efficiency to customers, is easy to set up and provides seamless integration with Rackspace Cloud Servers™ or Rackspace dedicated servers

An image from a vendor whitepaper shows the functions of SoftLayer’s hosting management team (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting giant SoftLayer ( www.softlayer.com ) announced on Tuesday that it has introduced SoftLayer Managed hosting, offering enterprise-class computing environments with 24-hour management and monitoring support for core pieces of those environments, including database, security, monitoring, backup and storage management. SoftLayer, formed last year by the merger of SoftLayer’s previous operations with those of The Planet, created an enormous hosting organization out of the two biggest players in the unmanaged dedicated server hosting business.

An illustration, from the Rackspace website, of Cloud Load Balancers in operation (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Managed and cloud hosting provider Rackspace ( www.rackspace.com ) announced on Tuesday that it has introduced its Cloud Load Balancers offering, a software-based, utility-priced load balancing product designed for use with its cloud hosting products, as well as its dedicated and managed server offerings. In private beta since Novmeber of 2010, and public beta since February of this year, Cloud Load Balancers, says Rackspace, is designed to alleviate the barriers to entry and architectural complexity associated with using third-party open source software load balancers. Based on that lengthy beta period, says Jerry Schwartz, enterprise services product manager at Rackspace, in an interview with the WHIR, the company incorporated a great deal of customer feedback into the development of its Cloud Load Balancers

Web Hosting – DALLAS, TX — SoftLayer Technologies® , the innovation leader in on-demand Cloud and Dedicated hosting, today announced the availability of MICRON RealSSD™ P300 solid state drives (SSDs) in 50GB, 100GB, and 200GB capacities. The new SSDs provide reliable and secure enterprise-class storage ideal for high-performance and data-intensive applications, such as databases requiring fast read/write performance

An illustration from the OpenStack Compute documentation (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The community around the open source cloud computing platform software OpenStack ( www.openstack.org ) announced on Friday that it has issued its third code release, code named “Cactus,” introducing more than 40 new features, and offering greater stability for larger-scale cloud computing platform deployments. Introduced less than a year ago, the OpenStack platform was originally comprised of code contributed by Rackspace ( www.rackspace.com ) and NASA, and has quickly built up a significant community, and acquired significant contributions from a range of large and small organizations and individuals.