Last week we saw a few interesting announcements from some of the cloud providers. Also, there were some ‘must read’ posts published by Microsoft, Amazon and Kinvey. In addition, there were some announcements on new release from Hortonworks and MongoHQ. Yet another important news was the key changes to the leadership team that took place at VMware and HP Cloud.

Here’s the summary of the happenings from the cloud world during the last week.

Beginning with the popular PaaS player, Windows Azure has provided guidance on the optimal approach to handle restarts correctly by using ‘OnStop’ Method. This method would eventually help in avoiding data loss, data corruption, quick shutdowns, restarts and handles new requests efficiently. In addition, they have also published a new tutorial series and a sample application that shows how to work with Windows Azure Storage tables, queues, and blobs in a multi-tier application that uses ASP.NET MVC 4 and ASP.NET Web API. Towards the later part of the week they have published the postmortem report of the Azure storage disruption that took place on December 28th, 2012.

Dominant cloud player Amazon, has brought a new feature for changing the name and endpoint of an existing Amazon RDS database instance via the AWS Management Console, the Amazon RDS API, or the Amazon RDS Command Line toolkit. This makes it simple to handle changes made to the RDS instances. They have also compiled a useful post with the list of AWS technical whitepapers, articles and videos that were generated in 2012.

Somewhere in the midst of last week, a couple of key transitions happened in the industry. VMWare’s CTO Steve Herrod stepped down to venture into the VC world as a managing director at General Catalyst. Followed by this was the news that the head of HP Converged Cloud initiative, Zorawar “Biri” Singh has s moved out of the company. These two changes will have significant impact on the industry.

Some of the PaaS and BaaS providers have made announcements on their new releases. StackMob announced their newest release of JavaScript SDK, version 0.7.0. This release would help developers with user authentication checks, improved Android browser support, and bug fixes to the custom code. CloudBees, the PaaS Provider has announced better integration with SendGrid’s APIs to provide their customers a robust cloud-based SMTP email solution. ActiveState has published a sample with a step-by-step guide for adding custom services to Stackato, the Cloud Foundry based PaaS.

Hortonworks, the Big Data platform provider has released Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 1.2, which includes the latest version of Apache Ambari for comprehensive management, monitoring and provisioning of Apache Hadoop clusters. MongoHQ, the provider of NoSQL-as-a-Service has announced the updates coming with the MongoDB 2.4 release. The improvements include Full-text search, change in the internal JavaScript engine and hashed indexes. Kinvey, a BaaS provider, shared useful information on the basics of IaaS and the key factors to consider before adopting IaaS. Also, Kinvey has updated the popular Backend as a Service Ecosystem Map which is in its third version now.

Stay tuned for more news and analysis!