It’s a big concession for Amazon which has regarded private and hybrid clouds as heretical.

It’s bowing to corporate demand for personal control, fostered heavily by safety concerns and crashes, reckoning it’s just a stage that companies will eventually grow out of along with their data centers and increasingly creaky legacy investments as they get used to the cloud.

While it waits, it’s going support Eucalyptus and help it extend the compatibility of its existing AWS APIs.

Amazon said customers should be able to “take advantage of a common set of APIs that work with both AWS and Eucalyptus, enabling the use of scripts and other management tools across both platforms without the need to rewrite or maintain environment-specific versions.”

This is seen as a big deal, and it could be a big problem for that other open source cloud platform OpenStack, which is immature compared to Eucalyptus and years behind Amazon. Of course OpenStack will retort that it’s just more lock-in since everything will be Amazon-compatible.

The move says a lot for Eucalyptus’ APIs, and supposedly positions Amazon’s APIs as the cloud’s de facto standard, something other big clouds ain’t gonna like at all.

Eucalyptus’ community master Greg DeKoenigsberg told ReadWriteCloud, “In the world of web services, it’s all about the API. Securing an agreement with Amazon, in which they actively support the development of an open source reference implementation that supports the AWS API, is a monumental step forward in cementing the AWS API as the de facto API for cloud computing, be it public, private, or hybrid.”

Eucalyptus can also stop worrying that Amazon is going to sue it someday for infringing its patents.

DeKoenigsberg said, “Amazon chose to partner with Eucalyptus because we were a great technical fit. Meeting AWS’s technical standards is a significant achievement, and we are extremely proud to be up to that lofty standard.”

The arrangement is not exclusive but it puts Eucalyptus, where MySQL veteran Marten Mickos is CEO, that much ahead. The start-up doesn’t figure it’s gonna have much competition on the Amazon front.

There was no mention of terms.

By the way, Eucalyptus is hiring.

It’s the first time Amazon has proposed putting its own software on the ground inside a corporate data center. And the stuff’s targeted at large corporations. Amazon says some customers asked for such a solution. It also expects resellers to offer the service.

It is of course proprietary and a competitive problem for other cloud storage and gateway suppliers. Come to think of it, Amazon as repository of corporate data is a problem for a lot of people.

The Gateway – think of it as an EBS snapshot-taking umbilical cord – will make it easier to use Amazon S3 storage for disaster recovery, business continuity and data mitigation as well as low-latency backup and once a company’s data is mirrored in the cloud – particularly since it’ll probably be stored there as EBS volumes – well, users will be tempted to experiment with other AWS services like EC2. Might as well, the data’s already there.

You see where this is going, right?

As Amazon put it in its official announcement, “The AWS Storage Gateway also makes it easy to leverage the on-demand compute capacity of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for additional capacity during peak periods, for new projects, or as a more cost-effective way to run normal enterprise workloads.”

Cloud backup of course promises the inevitable, tantalizing reduction in on-premise hardware, manpower and fears of tapes getting lost in transit.

The Gateway only needs commodity hardware and works with exiting DAS and SANs and applications. Amazon promises the data will be transported and stored securely using the industry standards required by banks and healthcare.

No applications have to be re-architected to accommodate the Gateway. It uses a standard iSCSI interface, transfers data to S3 over SSL, and AES encrypts it when it gets there. Then it makes it redundant.

Amazon is offering a 60-day free trial after which the service will run $125 a month for each Gateway, with storage set at 14 cents a gigabyte a month.

Each Gateway can handle up to 12TB of storage across 12 volumes. Fear not, accounts can have multiple gateways.

The service is available from Amazon data centers in the US, Ireland, Singapore and Tokyo.

The widgetry is still a beta and relatively rudimentary. Initially – and non-threateningly – all the data will be kept on the appliance – and on-premise – while it’s backed up in the cloud – so-called Gateway-Stored volumes.

Gateway-Cached volumes, where the only full copy of the data is in the cloud, and the data in the appliance is only what’s frequently accessed, won’t be available for a few months. There’s no deduplication or WAN optimization yet either although Amazon likely has plans.

Amazon said the first release of the Gateway takes the form of a VM image for VMware ESXi 4.1, with plans to support other virtual environments in the future. It currently supports mounting of its iSCSI storage volumes using Windows and Red Hat iSCSI Initiators.

Amazon is reportedly now examining the patents that HP acquired when it bought webOS last year as part of its $1.2 billion purchase of Palm.

HP CEO Meg Whitman told staff Tuesday that no decision would be made about the fate of webOS for another three or four weeks. Amazon’s patent examination would explain the delay. It might also suggests that Amazon could walk away if it doesn’t like what it finds or if financial terms can’t be reached. webOS isn’t expected to fetch more than a few hundred million dollars.

Whitman has been playing a coy “will she or won’t she” game about webOS, publicly toying with the idea of HP fielding new webOS devices while last week HP PC chief and erstwhile head of Palm Todd Bradley labeled tales of webOS being sold “rumors.” If they can’t get the deal done they may actually have to do something with it.

Earlier this week Reuters reported being told by four people “close to the matter” that HP was looking to sell the mobile software platform and one of its sources reportedly said Oracle might be interested, a claim that sounds as fishy as a red herring. Oracle and HP aren’t exactly on the best of terms these days and Oracle is utterly unlikely to do anything to extricate HP from the pickle it’s in trying to recoup its spoiled investment in Palm.

Based on industry speculation the wire service said Amazon as well as RIM, IBM and Intel might be interested in webOS and remembered that former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, now in a vague product innovation role at HP, is on Amazon’s board.

It is believed that Amazon wants webOS as an alternative to Android, despite the fact that Amazon runs its Android Appstore stocked with thousands of apps and that Android – well, a highly customized version of Android – runs its highly promising dirt-cheap Kindle Fire, the $199 tablet could give the $499 iPad its first really serious competition when it ships November 15.

According DigiTimes Amazon has upped the number of money-losing Kindle Fires it wants delivered before the end of the year to five million units. That’s supposed to be its second increase. It reportedly went from 3.5 million units to four million before. It’s supposedly got 100,000 pre-orders for the thing the first day and had a total of 220,000 in a week. Reportedly Apple iPads and iPhones are experiencing production cuts, sending its stock down.

Amazon Thursday updated its Appstore interface and features, including support for in-app purchases, parental controls and faster downloads, in time for Fire to take advantage of it. webOS has few apps to speak of.

Interestingly Reuters reported being told that HP really bought Palm for its patents. Maybe that’s what Amazon’s after too lest even a highly customized Android paint a big fat patent infringement bull’s eye on its back.

Back in September Byte thought that Samsung was likely to want the webOS patent portfolio to ward off Apple. It said the patents were broad and deep with fundamental claims that go back to the mid-90s and “reach far into the guts of most mobile tech in use today or on the horizon” including mobile multitasking, distributed networking, cloud computing, mobile user interface controls, telephony, visual search, 4G and touch.

Byte said the portfolio was valued at $1.4 billion last year but Reuters was told by one of its sources that webOS wouldn’t fetch a high price at auction.

In August HP pulled its poorly selling webOS-based TouchPad tablet after six weeks on the market, firing its hardware people in the process.

Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble Monday unveiled another low-end device: a $249 8.1-inch Android-based Nook Tablet that’s 50 buck more than Amazon’s Kindle Fire but half of the iPad’s starting price. It’s a little bigger than the Kindle Fire, with double the memory at 16GB – expandable further with a removable memory card – and is supposed to run for up to 11.5 hours to Amazon’s eight. It should be available next week.

Facts being thin on the ground one is left to speculate that that means all of Amazon’s Linux-based servers everywhere including all those Linux images on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The terms of the deal are secret of course, but Microsoft made sure to say that Amazon’s paying it “an undisclosed amount of money.”

The fact that Amazon appears to concede the legitimacy of Microsoft’s claims that Linux and other open source widgetry violate its patents is going to drive the Linux crowd up a wall. Microsoft has never identified which patents it’s talking about, which infuriates them more.

Linux Foundation chief Jim Zemlin went into a state of denial blogging that “a cross-licensing agreement is a non-news event. The fact that two entities with expensive stockpiles of outdated weapons felt the need to negotiate détente is not surprising. Let’s avoid second-guessing and implication. There’s nothing to see here. We have real code to write.”

Microsoft’s deputy general counsel for IP and licensing Horacio Gutierrez mumbled something about the Amazon deal demonstrating the companies’ “ability to reach pragmatic solutions to IP issues regardless of whether proprietary or open source software is involved.”

Microsoft says it’s cut more than 600 IP licensing deals in the six years since it started cashing in on its IP a la IBM.

It has only ever taken one company to court over patents in its whole life and that was TomTom last year over its Linux-based GPS navigation devices which used the FAT file format that’s in the Linux kernel. Ultimately the Dutch company caved and they settled out-of-court for money and the undertaking to tear out the offending code over time.

Amusingly – and without mentioning a word about Linux – Microsoft said Thursday that Panasonic had licensed its Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT) technology, the latest generation of the Microsoft file system, as well as its FAT32 long file name technology for media devices. exFAT is supposed to up the size of files that can be stored on flash memory devices, the speed at which they can be accessed and facilitate the interchange between desktop PCs and consumer electronics. The deal includes a patent license.

Microsoft also has exFAT licensing agreements with Sanyo and Olympus.

It means to release a limited beta Kindle Development Kit next month complete with sample code, APIs, tools and documentation so ISVs can build so-called “active content” for the dingus.

Which means it could turn more than just an e-book. More like maybe Apple’s unannounced, presumably competitive and reportedly multi-function “iSlate,” supposedly due to be unveiled Wednesday at a much higher price point than Kindle.

The SDK will include a Kindle Simulator to simulate the six-inch Kindle and 9.7-inch Kindle DX on Mac, Windows and Linux desktops.

Exactly how limited the beta will be is unclear but Amazon is telling developers to sign up at http://www.amazon.com/kdk/ so they’re notified when the widgetry’s out.

For the past two years, Amazon has had authors and publishers directly upload and sell content in the Kindle Store through a self-service Kindle publishing platform. A closed shop.

Kindle VP Ian Freed said Amazon is looking forward “to being surprised by what developers invent.” Kindle is still merely a digital representation of black ink on white paper with minimal graphics support and slow refresh so invention may be kinda limited but there’s Kindle’s gee-whiz 3G wireless delivery over Amazon’s Whispernet and the gadget’s seven-day battery life even with the wireless connection activated.

Amazon said Handmark is building a searchable Zagat guide of ratings and reviews of restaurants and Sonic Boom is building word games and puzzles.

Applications – a word that Amazon studiously avoids – that don’t use more than 100KB of bandwidth a month will be available as a one-time purchase, bigger ones will be sold as a monthly subscription and need a USB; really little ones will be free.

Amazon Wednesday dangled the iPhone-like option of a 70% royalty net of file size at 15 cents a megabyte in front of US publishers and writers. The scheme, which starts June 30, would practically double the average bookseller’s margin but Amazon still means to keep an unnatural $10 ceiling on books.

Another program that ends January 25 was unearthed by Tech Crunch. Buy a Kindle, try it for 30-day and if you don’t love it, you get your money back but get to keep the Kindle.

No, really. Swear to God. It’s not just us enamored of how much better people look by candlelight.

Because of dead-slow bandwidth on burgeoning datasets at the customer end Amazon Web Services (AWS) has invented a new Import/Export service that it started testing the other day in the US.

The limited beta offers to accelerate moving large amounts into S3 using portable storage devices sent back and forth by post.

Amazon gets it and uploads it, bypassing the Internet using its high-speed internal network and vetted personnel.

It intends to add an export facility and then move on to Europe.

It claims it could be more cost-effective than the user upgrading his connectivity because “It is now relatively easy to create a collection of data so large that it cannot be uploaded to offsite storage (e.g., Amazon S3) in a reasonable amount of time,” it says, particularly in the scientific space.

Amazon figures the service can be used for data migration, offsite backup, disaster recovery and direct data interchange – in other words if you regularly get content on portable storage devices from your business associates, they might as well sent it directly to Amazon.

Pricing includes an $80 fee for each storage device plus $2.49-an-hour for the time it takes to upload the data, with partial hours being billed as full hours.

Amazon says that if you’ve got a T1 line and 1TB of data you’d better use the mail otherwise it’ll take you 82 days to upload it. On a T3 connection it’d take three days. It figures the breakeven point would be 100GB and 600GB, respectively. If you’ve got a 100 Mbps connection, it suggests it would be more economical to use the Import/Export service if you’ve got 5TB. If you’re got a 1,000 Mbps connection then your breakeven would appear to be 60TB

Amazon’s very favorite device has an eSATA interface. USB2’s okay but either’s got to use the FAT32, ext2, ext3 or NTFS file system and fir an 8U rack. Otherwise you’ve got to negotiate with them. Amazon says it’ll return the device.

The fee, good for either one year or three, applies to each specific instance reserved and works out to a 30% savings over one year and 50% over three.

Users effectively pay for the hardware but not for its maintenance or idle hours and pay usage charges only when actually using the instances. If they don’t use an instance, they won’t pay usage charges for it.

EC2 general manager Peter De Santis says the company is responding to customer demand. It is closer to the kind of pricing enterprises are used to and assures them of availability. Obviously it helps them establish an ROI which in turn could push more of them into using Amazon for their base infrastructure rather than just the overflow.

It’s also a good gimmick in the midst of a fierce recession when the cloud s already beckoning.

Costs can be split between reserved instances and the conventional demand instances and temporary capacity can always be added. However, a reserved instance bought for, say, a high-CPU extra large instance cannot be changed for another kind of instance.

The reserved pricing is limited to Linux/Unix operating systems in specific data centers, what Amazon calls availability zones, that can’t be changed during the lifetime of the contract and for the moment only to the US. Amazon expects to extend it to its EU Region in time.

See http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/.