A few notable updates came out of the cloud this week, including a couple of from the open-source community.

Firstly, Cloudability announced that it’s making OpenStack compatible with the Google Compute Engine. The San Francisco startup is currently working on implementing the Compute Engine APIs in the open cloud OS project.

OpenStack can already run on Amazon Web Service, the kingpin of IaaS. Cloudability CTO Rand Bias considers GCE to be a solid second and pegs his company’s latest OpenStack contribution as a “game changer” for this exact reason, but he does admit that Google’s platform is “flying under the radar now.”

Over in the Linux ecosystem, Canonical silently rolled out an update to JuJu. The automation tool now works in every OpenStack environment that runs on the company’s popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, which is a big plus for HP Cloud Services users.

OpenStack has come a long way in two years. What once was a joint side project of Rackspace and NASA is now a force to be reckoned with, thanks to its own foundation, and positioning itself in a key role for driving datacenter trends, such as software-defined networking.

Speaking of trends, a new study found out that cloud service providers who invest more in upgrading their hardware realize significant cost savings when compared to their less up-to-date peers. A European research team conduced a one year survey on AWS and found that running modern servers can reduce in cost reductions of up to 30 percent.

Finally, there’s been a major update in the personal cloud. Microsoft rolled out a new version of Skype this week, tweaked and optimized for Windows 8. The VoIP software features an improved UI and added functionality, including the ability to send short video messages to contacts who are flagged as being away.