Last week, the cloud world seems to have received lots of new offerings and releases from various providers. There were new releases from CloudStack, Google, StackMob and MongoHQ. There was also a new feature release from Amazon. Microsoft has published an article on choosing the best SQL database solution in Windows Azure. Plus, an acquisition news from VMware and an analyst report on fourth quarter result of Rackspace are also in the offing.

Early last week, IaaS leader Amazon has introduced a new Route 53 DNS Failover feature. This feature pairs well with Amazon S3’s website hosting to create a simple, low-cost and reliable way to deploy a backup website. Thus, directing customers to a backup site when the primary website goes down. Next, they have announced price reduction of a relational database Multi-AZ deployment model from 15% to 32%. This model helps create a standby instance which maintains an up-to-date copy of the primary database. The pricing seems to be varying with the region where the Multi-AZ deployment occurs. Finally, there has been an announcement about the launch of Amazon Redshift to all its customers, which can be used from the AWS management console. This allows users to start with a few hundred terabytes and then scale up to a petabyte or more.

VMware, an IaaS provider, has announced the acquisition of Virsto Software, a California-based company whose software optimizes storage for virtual environments. They plan to support to integrate Virsto’s architecture and data management services into future VMware products. The Apache CloudStack project has announced the 4.0.1-incubating release of the CloudStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration platform.

Windows Azure, the PaaS player has published an article to help users choose a valid approach of choosing SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machine vs. SQL Database. Additionally, they have provided a simple decision tree to help opt for the best SQL database solution in Windows Azure for satisfying distinct database application needs.

Google App engine has released the 1.7.5 SDK. This release includes new features such as experimental Java 7 runtime, High Memory Instances and Mail Bounce Notifications. They have also published a series of great App Engine training videos to provide insight for both newbies as well as seasoned App Engine developers. StackMob, the leading mobile backend service provider has released its iOS SDK v1.3.0. This includes the ability to work with StackMob GeoPoint types in Core Data. Support for saving and querying geo points through the Core Data integration is also included.

There was an interesting report on the Rackspace growth in the fourth quarter of 2012. According to the report, although the sales estimates for the quarter were lower than expected, the net revenue was up 5 percent from the previous quarter. Plus, Rackspace saw an increase in its cloud sales, but the company still found its overall stock price dropping.

MongoHQ, the popular NoSQL service provider has announced that free, experimental databases running MongoDB 2.4 are now available at MongoLab. The new features and improvements in MongoDB 2.4 include full- text search, Java script engine v8, better GeoSpatial indexing and an interrupted index build.

Hoping to see a lot more interesting cloud news next week!