The scalability, performance and operational efficiencies afforded by the hyperscale model employed today in the world’s largest data centers are slowly but surely being brought into the reach of traditional enterprises, one open-source project at the time. At the forefront of the trend is CoreOS, a bare-bone Linux distribution that entered beta testing in May and is designed from the ground up for powering large-scale cloud environments.

The team behind CoreOS announced this week that it has nabbed $8 million in a first round of funding led by venture giant KPCB to accelerate the adoption of the operating system. The project already boasts the endorsement of Google, which selected it as the default image type for instances running on its infrastructure-as-a-service platform just a few weeks after the beta launch. To further foster public cloud use cases, CoreOS is now rolling out a managed version of its distro for the search giant’s Compute Engine, Amazon’s rivaling EC2 offering and a number of other services that aims to save users the hassle of keeping their installations up to date by automating update management.

Noticeably absent  from the list of supported providers is IBM, which entered the public cloud race last June with the acquisition of SoftLayer. Big Blue on Monday opened a new data center in London that it says already houses some  15,000 machines. The facility aims to give UK organizations the flexibility store mission-critical information in the public cloud without having to worry about the compliance risks associated with storing information in a foreign jurisdiction.

One layer higher up the public cloud stack, software-as-a-service giant Salesforce rolled out new mobile reporting capabilities for its application development environment that it says provide granular data access and visibility to data stored in its flagship CRM platform from any device. The company claims that the feature set, dubbed Mobile Reports & Dashboards, empowers decision makers to identify useful patterns across dashboards  while enabling developers to incorporate that  information into their apps and deliver more customized experiences. Also included in the package is support for visualizations from third-party chart libraries meant to make it easier for users to uncover actionable insights.

image courtesy IBM