Lovely little game, and nicely designed, but as someone with red-green colour blindness I'm having a really frustrating time distinguishing between the green and orange squares. It'd be a lot easier if you increased the contrast/luminescence between the two colours.
1. Deployment - basically, boot a seed node, then turn on machines. New nodes automatically install and come online, and are as easy to remove. This eases management when you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of machines.
2. Permissions - we've got a much finer-grained permissions system which comes in useful if you're deploying a massive cloud for use across, for example, a multi-site and multi-department organization.
3. Self-healing - we've got a lot of monitoring stuff which watches running services and migrates them around the cloud as things (inevitably) break or become unavailable.
4. Layer 2 networking - we're providing virtual layer 2 networks amongst instances, which allows dynamic creation and re-organization.
5. Multi-tenancy - there's a full multi-customer, multi-user model in the system, which allows you to easily re-sell capacity.
6. Federation - using the same user and permission framework, you can pull up instances either in the local private cloud, other people's Nimbula clouds, or in public clouds like EC2 or Rackspace (or, I guess, even accessible Ubuntu clouds).
Basically, UEC is a good choice for running a local EC2 clone, but falls down a bit when you require very large clusters or strong security. We've had the opportunity to rethink and design our own system, rather than clone an existing one, which allows us to offer a greater range of possibilities.
Hmm, _maybe_ Javascript. You really need to be able to jump in and see results - visual results. The visual feedback of Logo was definitely instrumental in getting me into programming.