A lot of updates from the cloud crossed the wire this week, including one big advancement for the OpenStack community.

Piston Cloud, a distributor of the cloud OS, unveiled a simplified version of OpenStack that can be deployed in less than 10 minutes. This is a big deal because the full-fledged platform requires the configuration of several different systems, and as a result Airframe – as the new offering is called – opens up the open-source project to new audiences. The fact that the free software can be rolled out without any sort of technical makes it ideal for several different purposes, such as application testing.

OpenStack is the brainchild of Rackspace, and the cloud host also had a big update this week. The company unveiled new monitoring software that gives users a better view of running processes, their network and other components of their infrastructure. Rackspace Cloud Monitoring works with a number of different platforms and is not touted as anything revolutionary, but it does do a few things better than some alternative offerings.

Rival Amazon also introduced a new AWS system that gives customers better insight into their cloud environments.   Users can now tag resources, such as EC2 instances and S3 buckets, and filter them based on those keywords. This is a fairly simplistic approach to making usage tracking more compartmentalized: services can be associated with an individual department, and an admin can find out exactly how much cloud overhead it generates.

A day before this enhancement AWS launched Glacier, a cloud-based alternative to tape backup. Getting access to data is slow and it will cost you, but it’s still faster – and more cost efficient – than the more traditional alternatives. Retrieval rats are fairly high, but storage can be as cheap as one cent per GB per month.