The last few days saw a string of major industry updates spanning the open-source private cloud all the way up to the proprietary public cloud. It was Red Hat that fired the opening shot with the launch of the latest version of its OpenStack distribution, which introduces a host of new features and enhancements aimed at making the platform more practical to operate for risk-averse enterprise IT organizations operating on a tight budget.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform (OSP) 5.0 brings with it the ability to create server groups that can be managed as a single logical movement and provide increased resilience against outages affecting individual machines in a cluster. The upgrade also includes support for VMware’s vSphere, which competes with Red Hat’s RHEV hypervisor, and the virtualization giant’s NXS network virtualization software. An equally important addition is the new three-year support plan now available for the platform, which may not be as buzzworthy as the feature updates but is equally significant for the CIOs in the trenches that have to prepare for the inevitable mishaps that will be coming down their way sooner or later.

In the cloud economy, the C-levels have more to worry about on the technology front than ever. That is especially true Jeffrey Hausman, who on Tuesday was appointed as the chief executive of CloudPhysics,  The veteran executive had previously held senior positions at a number of major tech firms and is taking over the reins from founder and one-time colleague at Veritas John Blumenthal.

In his new gig, Hausman will be responsible for driving the sustained growth of CloudPhysics, which develops predictive analytics software for monitoring and optimizing operations in the kind of large virtualized data centers used by global enterprises and service providers. Amazon falls into that category, but the infrastructure-as-a-service stalwart prefers to make its own.

At its AWS Summit in New York, the retail-turned-cloud-giant introduced Amazon Mobile Analytics, a  managed solution that allows developers to collect data from their apps and scan that information for useful insight into performance and activity patterns. The offering made its debut alongside Cognito, a user identity management and data synchronization service, and a hosted collaboration workbench called Zocalo aimed at enterprise workers. The platform provides file sharing capabilities and a feedback system that allows employees to request their peers’ input on specific documents and even individual sentences.

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