Everyone wants a byte of the action these days with Cloud Computing, from major players like Amazon to small upstarts who explore this new territory as if it were the great American frontier. Microsoft is no exception, as their announcement yesterday in London proves.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced yesterday at a Software plus Services partner event in the British capital that the company will launch, as has been suspected in the past, a new cloud-based operating system, most likely a cloud variant of Windows Server. Ballmer gave it a temporary name of ‘Windows Cloud’, although this is not going to be its official designation.

“We need a new operating system designed for the cloud and we will introduce one in about four weeks, we’ll even have a name to give you by then,” Ballmer said. He hinted that the Cloud will even look a lot like Windows Server, essentially being to it what Windows Server was to the desktop version of windows.

Meanwhile Amazon is not idle, and has announced that their rival cloud computing service, the application development-oriented Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) would, starting this fall, be able to run on Windows Server and the SQL server database. It has already been upgraded since August with Elastic Block Storage (EBS), a system which allows stored data to persist after an EC2 virtual machine (called an Instance) is terminated. Amazon’s EC2 as well as its Simple Storage Service (S3) have come to be considered essential cloud services. They have set a standard that Microsoft and any starting companies will have to meet and exceed.

Microsoft, who will launch the new Windows Cloud and reveal more about their ideas with software-as-services in late October at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC). Microsoft will have 33 sessions at PDC that deal with cloud computing. One of the most notable is Architecting Services for the Cloud. According to its description, "This session discusses the impact that designing for the cloud has on all stages of the service lifecycle, and how the Microsoft cloud platform works for you to meet the scaling and availability goals of your service.” More information is available at http://www.microsoftpdc.com/

As noted before, the established big boys are not the only ones playing on the clouds, as the new expanding field is giving other stars a chance to shine. One of these is California-based 3tera, who announced on Wednesday the release of the test version of their distributed operating system, AppLogic’s version 2.4. The system, which has been around since 2006 and is used by certain cloud service providers, only supported Linux and Solaris apps so far. With the release of 2.4, Windows applications are supported as well, which is an “important requirement for an open cloud computing environment robust enough to take on any Web or enterprise application," said Bert Armijo, senior vice president of sales and marketing for 3Tera, in a statement.