PiCloud, a cloud-computing platform for the Python Programming Language, has released version 1.8 of its client library, cloud. PiCloud enables Python users to leverage the power of an on-demand, high performance, and auto scaling compute cluster with as few as three lines of code! No server management necessary. You can find out more here: http://www.picloud.com What's New: * The client library is now open source with an LGPL license. * Users can choose to run their code across 2.5ghz nodes or 1ghz nodes with a simple kwarg. * Users can now select to run their code in real-time, guaranteeing that their processes start in under a second. * Drop-in replacement for multiprocessing. * Improved cluster workload distribution performance by 20%. * Improved efficiency of Python interpreter state extraction by the client library. * Optimized for all Python packages in the Enthought Python Distribution. * Bug fixes. * And much more! Full service description: PiCloud is a cloud-computing platform that integrates into the Python Programming Language. It enables you to leverage the compute power of Amazon Web Services without having to manage, maintain, or configure virtual servers. PiCloud integrates seamlessly into your existing code base through a custom Python library, cloud. To offload the execution of a function to the cloud, all you must do is pass your desired function into the cloud library. PiCloud will then run the function on its high-performance and automatically-scaling cluster. We quickly scale our server capacity to meet your computational needs, and only charge you for the resources you actually consume. Getting on the cloud has never been this easy! PiCloud improves the full cycle of software development and deployment. Functions that are run on PiCloud have their resource usage monitored, performance analyzed, and errors traced; we further aggregate all your functions to give you a bird's eye view of your service. Through these introspective capabilities, PiCloud enables you to develop faster, easier, and smarter. Common use cases for our platform: * Crawling the web * Manipulating images and videos * Generating charts and graphs * Statistical analysis of data sets * Real-time data processing Cheers, Ken Elkabany PiCloud, Inc.