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Eucalyptus Project Delivers Open Source Cloud Computing with EC2 Interface Compatibility

by Scott Delap on Jul 21, 2008 |

Eucalyptus is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing cloud computing. It allows users to leverage their own server farms. The current version requires Xen to be installed on all nodes available for allocation. Among its features:

Interface compatibility with EC2 (both Web service and Query interfaces)

Simple installation and deployment using Rocks cluster-management tools

Secure internal communication using SOAP with WS-security

Overlay functionality requiring no modification to the target Linux environment

Basic "Cloud Administrator" tools for system management and user accounting

The ability to configure multiple clusters, each with private internal network addresses, into a single Cloud.

The FAQ on the website is quick to point out that while being interface compatible Eucalyptus is not a precise clone of Amazon EC2:

... Eucalyptus supports Amazon's interface syntactically and it implements the same functionality (with a few exceptions), but internally it is almost certainly different. Eucalyptus is designed to be extensible and easy to install and maintain ... While we can't be certain, Amazon's main design goal almost has to be scalability. Put another way, if we were to design a commercial software venue for cloud services where scalability is paramount and we could mandate how all clusters within the cloud were initially configured (instead of an open-source software tool for community distribution) we would have designed Eucalyptus differently...

Interested readers can find a presentation by project member Rich Wolski from the Velocity conference. Virtualization.com is also running an interview with Wolski.