Some people may not know, but Canonical, the company that manages development of the open-source Linux based operating system "Ubuntu", tags their releases a couple of ways. First, the release number is determined by the month and year it's released. For instance, Ubuntu 8.10 was released in October of 2008. They also tag an animal name with each release: "Gutsy Gibbon", "Hoary Hedgehog", "Intrepid Ibex", "Jaunty Jackalope" (due in April) and now "Karmic Koala" for October.

The kismet part is that "Karmic Koala" will be the first release to include Eucalyptus, which one can only hope was not named specifically for the Ubuntu release.

Eucalyptus is an open-source cloud computing platform that allows you to build your own cloud infrastructure similar to Amazon's EC2. With it, you can dynamically assign resources as your computing needs grow and shrink.

One of the big fears of cloud computing has been what happens when the cloud goes down? What if a fiber line is cut and your office can't reach Amazon's or Google's servers anymore? What if Amazon wakes up and decides one day they don't want to host cloud applications anymore? With Eucalyptus you can have your own cloud, running in your own datacenter.

But doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose of using "the cloud"? Either way, this brings Ubuntu another step further into the large enterprise, which is where the large support contract dollars are, showing that Canonical is not stupid.