RightScale Teams With Eucalyptus for Cloud Solutions

Back in June, we broke the news about Eucalyptus, an open-source (under a FreeBSD-style license) infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon's EC2, using the Amazon command-line tools directly. Now RightScale, a leader in cloud computing management and support, has announced a partnership with the Eucalyptus team at U.C. Santa Barbara to foster cloud computing research, experimentation and adoption.

From RightScale's announcement:

"Starting today, the RightScale cloud computing management platform is available for use with the Eucalyptus Public Cloud (EPC), a cluster of servers at UCSB for testing and evaluating the Eucalyptus cloud infrastructure. RightScale and the Eucalyptus Project Team are also collaborating to deliver a more robust private cloud for organizations whose testing requirements extend beyond those offered by the EPC. The RightScale-Eucalyptus partnership is aimed at making cloud computing simple and accessible to everyone from universities, students and entrepreneurs to enterprises evaluating large cloud deployments."

And Michael Crandell, CEO at RightScale, adds:

"Now anyone -- from those just becoming familiar with cloud computing to organizations evaluating a massive application for deployment on Amazon's EC2 -- will be able to easily test their applications on the Eucalyptus EC2-compatible, open source cloud infrastructure using RightScale's management platform."

In addition to Eucalyptus, RightScale also supports other cloud infrastructures, including Amazon's EC2, FlexiScale and GoGrid. It offers people deploying cloud applications the benefit of integrated management and support across the various platforms.

RightScale isn't alone in partnering with the Eucalyptus team to provide management and support. Elastra has also announced cloud server support for the Eucalyptus platform. For several reasons, it's good to see Eucalyptus being adopted as an open source player in the fast-growing cloud computing realm, which Microsoft has also recently entered. I expect that Eucalyptus will help prevent price-gouging and preserve healthy competition.