Eucalyptus (computing)

Developer(s)	Eucalyptus Systems, Inc.
Initial release	1.0 2008-05-29
Stable release	2.0.2 / 2010-12-15
Written in	Java, C
Operating system	Linux, can host Linux and Windows VMs
Platform	Hypervisors (Xen, KVM, VMware)
Type	Private cloud computing
License	Proprietary, GPL v3
Website	www.eucalyptus.com

Eucalyptus is a software platform for the implementation of private cloud computing on computer clusters. There is an open-core enterprise edition and an open-source edition. Currently, it exports a user-facing interface that is compatible with the Amazon EC2 and S3 services but the platform is modularized so that it can support a set of different interfaces simultaneously. The development of Eucalyptus software is sponsored by Eucalyptus Systems, a venture-backed start-up. Eucalyptus works with most currently available Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), openSUSE, Debian and Fedora. It can also host Microsoft Windows images. Similarly Eucalyptus can use a variety of virtualization technologies including VMware, Xen and KVM hypervisors to implement the cloud abstractions it supports. Eucalyptus is an acronym for “Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems”.

History

Eucalyptus began as a research project in the field of high performance computing (HPC) under the direction of Professor Rich Wolski in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In January 2009, a company named Eucalyptus Systems, Inc. was founded to support the commercialization of the Eucalyptus Cloud Computing platform.

Features

Eucalyptus implements IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) style private and hybrid clouds. The platform provides a single interface that lets users access computing infrastructure resources (machines, network, and storage) available in private clouds—implemented by Eucalyptus inside an organizations's existing data center—and resources available externally in public cloud services. The software is designed with a modular and extensible Web services-based architecture that enables Eucalyptus to export a variety of APIs towards users via client tools. Currently, Eucalyptus implements the industry-standard Amazon Web Services (AWS) API, which allows the interoperability of Eucalyptus with existing AWS services and tools. Eucalyptus provides its own set of command line tools called Euca2ools, which can be used internally to interact with Eucalyptus private cloud installations or externally to interact with public cloud offerings, including Amazon EC2.

Eucalyptus includes these features:

• Compatibility with Amazon Web Services API.
• Installation and deployment from source or DEB and RPM packages.
• Secure communication between internal processes via SOAP and WS-Security.
• Support for Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs) .
• Support for multiple clusters as a single cloud.
• Elastic IPs and Security Groups.
• Users and Groups Management.
• Accounting reports.
• Configurable scheduling policies and SLAs.

Eucalyptus Software architecture

The Eucalyptus cloud computing platform has five high-level components: Cloud Controller (CLC), Cluster Controller (CC), Walrus, Storage Controller (SC) and Node Controller (NC). Each high-level system component has its own Web interface and is implemented as a stand-alone Web service. This has two major advantages: First, each Web service exposes a well-defined language-agnostic API in the form of a WSDL document containing both the operations that the service can perform and the input/output data structures. Second, Eucalyptus leverages existing Web-service features such as security policies (WSS) for secure communication between components and relies on industry-standard web-services software packages.

Eucalyptus Components

Cloud Controller (CLC) - The CLC is responsible for exposing and managing the underlying virtualized resources (machines (servers), network, and storage) via user-facing APIs. Currently, the CLC exports a well-defined industry standard API (Amazon EC2) and via a Web-based user interface.

Walrus - Walrus implements scalable “put-get bucket storage.” The current implementation of Walrus is interface compatible with Amazon’s S3 (a get/put interface for buckets and objects), providing a mechanism for persistent storage and access control of virtual machine images and user data.

Cluster Controller (CC) - The CC controls the execution of virtual machines (VMs) running on the nodes and manages the virtual networking between VMs and between VMs and external users.

Storage Controller (SC) - The SC provides block-level network storage that can be dynamically attached by VMs. The current implementation of the SC supports the Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) semantics.

Node Controller (NC) - The NC (through the functionality of a hypervisor) controls VM activities, including the execution, inspection, and termination of VM instances.

Products and Variants

Eucalyptus open source has been through multiple releases. The first Eucalyptus (version 1.0) was developed and released in the context of a research project at the University of California Santa Barbara. Eucalyptus open source version 1.5.2 was the first release of the software since the founding of the company Eucalyptus Systems, Inc. Releases of the open-source core of Eucalyptus are scheduled semi-annually for March and August.

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC)

Since version 1.5 Eucalyptus has been included in Ubuntu and is now the core element of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC). Since version 1.6.2 Eucalyptus has been included in Debian. In May 2011 Canonical decided to switch from Eucalyptus to OpenStack starting from Ubuntu 11.10. Support for Eucalyptus will be available, but OpenStack will be the default.

Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EE)

Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EE) is a commercial offering based on the open source Eucalyptus.

Deployment

Eucalyptus core software is available for installation from source or from binary DEB and RPM packages. It is also the core element of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), a cloud computing module provided with distributions of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system.

See also

• Amazon EC2
• Cloud computing comparison
• Nimbus (cloud computing)
• OpenNebula
• OpenStack
• Cloud computing
• Ubuntu One

External links

• Eucalyptus Official website
• Eucalyptus 3.0 Roadmap