Eucalyptus Spotlight: Accelerating on-premise Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms

29 Aug 2012

Show me an early market entrant
Eucalyptus started as a research project in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Engineers for the Virtual Grid Application Development Software Project (VGrADS) were tasked to investigate novel programming language and runtime system techniques for large-scale computational grid applications. By late 2007, VGrADS had demonstrated a new kind of virtualization to make supercomputers appear to be dedicated and schedulable on-demand. On April 23, 2009, Ubuntu released the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, powered by Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus is built as an open source cloud product and is suited for enterprise-class private cloud or hybrid cloud computing. The platform supports industry-standard Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud APIs, and all major virtualization platforms. The company has an active and growing ecosystem of customers, partners, developers, and researchers that access Eucalyptus' open, fast, and standards-compliant path to cloud computing.

How does it work?

Eucalyptus uses infrastructure virtualization software to create elastic pools that can be dynamically scaled up or down depending on application workloads. It employs existing infrastructure to create a scalable, secure web services layer that abstracts compute, network and storage to offer IaaS. Its high-availability IaaS Service each cloud component is replicated and deployed as an active-passive service, In the event of a failure of an active service component, the passive service component will take over the management control seamlessly to allow continuous operation.

User identity management capabilities use fine-grained Role-Based Access Control mechanisms for each resource pool, and can be integrated with existing Microsoft Active Directory or LDAP systems, and are compatible with the Amazon IAM API.
 Flexible accounting, chargeback and quota management capabilities, cloud usage pattern analysis, administration dashboard with graphical consoles and support for self-service IaaS users are some of the more popular features.

Is this relevant for me?

Eucalyptus sees its services supporting six distinct roles in enterprise IT. For end users, service transparency, self-service configuration and on demand provisioning are key. For developers, it provides a growing range of automation, tools and new artifacts for managing new images for cloud, virtualization, and physical infrastructure. For administrators, configuration support, problem resolition support and managing backup and disaster recovery (data retentions policy and our the cloud are available. To support application architects,Eucalyptus has enabled legacy migration, data management and lifecycle management tools. Infrastructure architects and managers get design, capacity management and SLA management support.