Amazon’s cloud services are a great thing. They give you instant access to computing power over the web, letting you instantly store data and run applications. But if you want to set up your own cloud service, Amazon can’t help you. You need software like Riak CS.
Riak CS is a file system for storing data, and it’s designed to be fully compatible with Amazon’s popular cloud storage service, S3. It can be used to create private Amazon-style storage systems in your own data center, to build public services that compete with Amazon, or to power web applications of your own creation. And as of Wednesday, it’s open source.