Eucalyptus Cloud Computing

Eucalyptus [IaaS] Private Cloud Construction

Companies currently face hurdles related to the elastic provisioning of compute clouds on existing data center infrastructure and the inability of the data layer to scale at the same rate as the compute layer.
— Eucalyptus CTO Rich Wolski, Feb. 2010

EUCALYPTUS is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. It was started as a research project in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Eucalyptus is an open source software application that implements cloud computing within the datacenter. Eucalyptus provides a highly robust and scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution for Service Providers and Enterprises.

Eucalyptus lets you build an on-premise cloud from your IT resources that is compatible with Amazon AWS (EC2, S3, EBS). Eucalyptus open source runs on multiple Linux distributions and supports Xen and KVM hypervisors. One Linux distribution, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), embeds Eucalyptus.

Eucalyptus just announced a joint Terracotta-Eucalyptus offering. Terracotta is eliminating the inability for relational databases to scale to meet the demand for expanding applications and cloud architectures, which is often the biggest bottleneck in private clouds.

According to Jay Lyman & Csilla Zsigri of The 451 Group, Eucalyptus is targeting midsize and larger enterprises with EEE, charging a per-core annual license fee that is still taking shape. It is also offering a proof of concept price for setup, implementation and training on a pre-production Eucalyptus deployment. Among larger early customers, Eucalyptus says pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is a good example of a typical EEE user.

Eucalyptus stresses large-scale, long-term environment support, scalability and the ability to 'homogenize' with public clouds as key customer demands. Eucalyptus also reports that while some legacy applications, particularly those not engineered for virtualization, may be more difficult to manage in cloud environments, applications built under modern service-oriented architecture practices are proving ideal for cloud deployment.

Alternatives to Eucalyptus include IBM's Blue Cloud business cloud computing project and Red Hat's Deltacloud, an open source project and API for private cloud construction.

Would like to see some more customer success story press releases from Eucalyptus and a clear updated product roadmap.