EUCALYPTUS – An Open Source Cloud Computing Platform

Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems (EUCALYPTUS) is a new project that seems to be trying to put an “open source” flavor to cloud computing. Assuming relative parity between the implementation of Elastic, Utility or Cloud computing infrastructures, EUCALYPTUS is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing computing clusters and/or workstation farms. The current interface to is interface-compatible with Amazon.com’s EC2 but the infrastructure is designed to be modified and extended so that multiple client-side interfaces can be supported.

EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly-available Linux tools and basic web service technology. The goal of the EUCALYPTUS project is to foster community research and development of Elastic/Utility/Cloud service implementation technologies, resource allocation strategies, service level agreement (SLA) mechanisms and policies, and usage models. The current release includes the following features:

* Interface compatibility with EC2
* Simple installation and deployment using Rocks cluster-management tools
* Simple set of extensible cloud allocation policies
* 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.