Cloud Computing: Eucalyptus Won’t Be Left Behind In Network Virtualization

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Eucalyptus, the third, so-called ugly sister of open source cloud computing projects, gets less attention than OpenStack and CloudStack, but remains in contention to provide the software for the enterprise "private" cloud. The "ugly sisters" were so named by a less than diplomatic VMware executive, Mathew Lodge, VP of cloud strategies, in an April blog on the VMware site. Eucalyptus was around before OpenStack and CloudWatch, making it the elder of the three. In the eyes of Eucalyptus CTO Rich Wolski, the company will yet emerge as the belle of the ball.

Wolski is the University of California at Santa Barbara computer science professor who started a project five years ago to build open source APIs. In 2007, there weren’t many models to choose from. There was Amazon’s EC2 and not much else. So Wolski and his students created open source alternative APIs for the AWS S3 and EC2 compute and a few other basic AWS services…

That move brought neither approval nor disapproval from Amazon Web Services, just a brooding, five-year silence until last March when Eucalyptus became the only private cloud software vendor to enter into a partnership with Amazon. By creating an open source alternative, Eucalyptus was helping customers build out their own clouds in a way that Amazon couldn’t, while still building in Amazon compatibility. Amazon agreed to help Eucalyptus achieve compatibility and continues to do that…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/software/infrastructure/eucalyptus-wont-be-left-behind-in-networ/240062620