Rackspace’s 43,000 cloud-computing customers played a major role in the API specifications. They overwhelmingly preferred the newer lighter-weight REST approach to the older heavy-duty SOAP standard that Amazon uses.
Rubinius, a project to develop the next generation virtual machine for the Ruby programming language, implements the core libraries in Ruby, making a system accessible for development and extension. Merb is a light framework that is ORM, JavaScript library, and template language agnostic.
My take on these announcements is that Red Hat wants to take its Linux distribution clout far beyond the market for dedicated servers and blades at individual enterprises, and become the de facto industry standard for how hosting organizations, telecommunications providers, entertainment providers, and on-demand ISVs deploy all their applications over the next 10 years.
Sun may not be first in this space, but it does have the assets to be large. For example, Sun already has a compute-intensive grid, and ample storage as a service offerings. By bringing its tools, NetBeans framework, open source Java community, middleware, virtualized runtime containers, and pay-per-drink grid together provides a significant, long-term subscription opportunity for Sun and its partners.
These two announcements don't constitute a Amazon stampede, by any stretch of the imagination, but they're more hopeful than some of the crepe-hangers who were pooh-poohing Jeff Bezos' virtual computing ideas only a few months ago.