Eucalyptus at Age 1: Notes from the First Year of Building and Supporting an Open-source Cloud Computing Platform

Eucalyptus – Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems – is an open-source cloud platform that supports popular APIs such as Amazon’s AWS and Google’s AppEngine. First presented to the cloud computing community in 2008 at Velocity only days after its initial release, this talk will describe Eucalyptus today – one year later – and its transition from a product of a university research project to that of commercial open-source start-up. In particular, the talk will describe the interplay between the technical road map for Eucalyptus, its emergence as a popular open-source cloud platform, and its commercial uses.

The goal of Eucalyptus is to allow sites with existing clusters and server infrastructure to host a cloud that is interface-compatible with different cloud APIs including Amazon’s AWS. In addition, through its interfaces, Eucalyptus is able to host cloud platform services such as AppScale (an open source implementation of Google’s AppEngine), and Hadoop making it possible the “mix and match” different service paradigms and configurations within the cloud. Eucalyptus is also capable of leveraging a heterogeneous collection of virtualization technologies within a single cloud making it possible to incorporate resources that have already been virtualized without modifying their configuration.

We will discuss our experiences in building and supporting open-source cloud infrastructure designed to support this degree of flexibility and point to potential future directions that we believe will enable greater innovation.