Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus is an open source software platform for implementing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in a private or hybrid cloud computing environment.

The Eucalyptus cloud platform pools together existing virtualized infrastructure to create cloud resources for infrastructure as a service, network as a service and storage as a service. The name Eucalyptus is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems.

Eucalyptus was founded out of a research project in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and became a for-profit business called Eucalyptus Systems in 2009. Eucalyptus Systems announced a formal agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in March 2012, allowing administrators to move instances between a Eucalyptus private cloud and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to create a hybrid cloud. The partnership also allows Eucalyptus to work with Amazon’s product teams to develop unique AWS-compatible features.

Eucalyptus features include:

·         Supports both Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs).

·         Application program interface- (API) compatible with Amazon EC2 platform.

·         Compatible with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Simple Storage Service (S3).

·         Works with multiple hypervisors including VMware, Xen and KVM.

·         Can be installed and deployed from source code or DEB and RPM packages.

·         Internal processes communications are secured through SOAP and WS-Security.

·         Multiple clusters can be virtualized as a single cloud.

·         Administrative features such as user and group management and reports.

Version 3.3, which became generally available in June 2013, adds the following features:

·         Auto Scaling: Allows application developers to scale Eucalyptus resources up or down based on policies defined using Amazon EC2-compatible APIs and tools 

·         Elastic Load Balancing: AWS-compatible service that provides greater fault tolerance for applications

·         CloudWatch: An AWS-compatible service that allows users to collect metrics, set alarms, identify trends, and take action to ensure applications run smoothly

·         Resource Tagging: Fine-grained reporting for showback and chargeback scenarios; allows IT/ DevOps to build reports that show cloud utilization by application, department or user

·         Expanded Instance Types: Expanded set of instance types to more closely align to those available in Amazon EC2. Was 5 before, now up to 15 instance types.

·         Maintenance Mode: Allows for replication of a virtual machine’s hard drive, evacuation of the server node and provides a maintenance window.