Eucalyptus�Open Source Software Supporting Hybrid Cloud Solutions

A popular way of integrating public and private clouds is using Eucalyptus (www.eucalyptus.com). Eucalyptus is an open source software platform that implements IaaS-style cloud computing using the Linux-based infrastructure found in many modern data centers. While it can be deployed solely for private clouds, because it is interface-compatible with Amazon�s AWS, it is possible to move workloads between AWS and the data center without code modification.

Many other cloud vendors support Eucalyptus, so today, it is the most portable option available. Eucalyptus also works with most of the currently available Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), openSUSE, Debian, and Fedora. Importantly, Eucalyptus can use a variety of virtualization technologies, including VMware, Xen, and KVM, to implement the cloud abstractions it supports. Eucalyptus�s Walrus is an S3-compatible implementation of cloud storage. It is well-described in The Eucalyptus Open-source Cloud-computing System.

The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) is powered by Eucalyptus and brings an Amazon EC2-like infrastructure inside the firewall. It appears that the recently announced Nimbula, which supports private versions of EC2, is similar.

Ubuntu UEC is open source, with commercial support available from Canonical Ltd., a company founded (and funded) by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth (formerly the official maintainer of Debian, a version of Linux, and founder of Thawte Consulting) for the promotion of free software projects. Canonical is registered in the Isle of Man (part of the Channel Islands), a favorable tax jurisdiction, and employs staff around the world, as well as in its main offices in London. Ubuntu JeOS is an efficient variant of Ubuntu configured specifically for virtual appliances.

Eucalyptus Features and Benefits
The most attractive features of Eucalyptus are:
� Is compatible with Amazon AWS (EC2, S3, and EBS)
� Includes Walrus, an Amazon S3 interface-compatible storage manager
� Has added support for elastic IP assignment
� Has a Web-based interface for cloud configuration
� Provides image registration and image attribute manipulation
� Provides configurable scheduling policies and service level agreements (SLAs)
� Supports multiple hypervisor technologies within the same cloud

The benefits of Eucalyptus include:
� The ability to build a private cloud that can �cloud-burst� into Amazon AWS
� Easy deployment on all types of legacy hardware and software
� Leveraging of the development strength of a worldwide user community
� Compatibility with multiple distributions of Linux, including support for the commercial Linux distributions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)

Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition 2.0 was built on the core Eucalyptus open source platform, with additional functionality designed to optimize the building and deploying of massively scalable, high performance private clouds in the enterprise. The latest release adds support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008 and Windows 7 virtual machines. (Previously, only Linux images were supported). Other changes include new accounting and user group management capabilities, allowing administrators to easily define groups of users and allocate different levels of access based on a group�s needs.

The benefits of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) include:
� It incorporates Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition (April 2009); an enhanced version of Eucalyptus that uses the KVM hypervisor was integrated into the distribution. This allows any user to deploy a cloud that matches the same API employed by AWS.

� Official Ubuntu images have been released that work both on AWS (a Xen-based hypervisor system) and a UEC cloud (a KVMbased hypervisor system)

Source of Information :  Implementing and Developing Cloud Computing Applications 2011