While the hype over cloud computing is, give us your computing loads and leave the driving to us, Morph Labs is saying, wait a minute, what about provisioning compute and storage capacity, load balancing, or creating databases. This week at JavaOne, Morph is adding support for Java apps. That comes atop its original support for Ruby on Rails, which it released as part of its launch earlier this year.

The company is the latest creation of serial open source entrepreneur Winston Damarillo, the guy who started Gluecode and LogicBlaze, which he sold to IBM and Iona, respectively, plus a handful of less successful open source startups at Simula Labs.

Based in the Philippines, Morph provides a management framework that simplifies deployment in the cloud, and is currently setting its target on Amazon’s EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud. In essence, it does for cloud computing what provisioning and management tools like HP’s Opsware does for internal deployments. And, just as transaction monitors used to provide pooling mechanisms that helped customers reduce I/O charges with legacy databases, Morph Labs claims it can do same with cloud customers.

Of course, the idea of cloud computing is that it is supposed to eliminate the hassle of setting up your own data center. But unlike more formal platforms like Salesforce, cloud computing centers may not at this point have all the depth of management tooling. So, when you order some capacity on demand with EC2, you have to deploy your apps and databases yourself. And you pay EC2 a flat fee (based on parameters such as amount of memory, storage, CPU cores, and data transfer rates).

What Morph does is provide an automated management layer that automatically deploys, provisions, and performs load management and database creation. It provides you an instance of Postgres SQL (it will add MySQL soon). Additionally, it pools your resources with other Morph/EC2 customers, claiming that $1/instance daily charge is more than offset by the savings because you are paying for only as much EC2 capacity as you are actually using, as opposed to contracting for.

In coming months, Morph will add support for other popular web languages, with PHP the likely next bet. And it will spread support to other cloud computing platforms as well.

---