Eucalyptus 3.4 Arrives, Emphasizes Private Clouds, AWS Compatibility

Here on OStatic, back in 2008, we broke the story about a U.C. Santa Barbara cloud computing project called Eucalyptus. Now version 3.4 of Eucalyptus is out, and it is differentiated from other open cloud computing platforms, such as OpenStack, through its deep integration with Amazon Web Services. Eucalyptus was built in the first place to duplicate the functionality of Amazon's EC2, using the Amazon command-line tools directly. The lates version is directly focused on organizations that want to build AWS-compatible private and hybrid clouds.

According to the announcement from Eucalyptus Systems:

"New features including image migration and management, a hybrid cloud user console, identity and access management (IAM) roles, enhanced high availability and warm upgrade provide developers and cloud administrators with increased application development agility and a seamless path to hybrid cloud computing."

"To simplify the process of moving development and test workloads to a private cloud, Eucalyptus 3.4 introduces new and enhanced utilities for converting Amazon Machine Images to Eucalyptus Machine Images (EMI). For VMware users, improved support for VMDK-to-EMI helps onboard existing, virtualized applications, and lower or cap VMware licensing costs based on Eucalyptus' support of KVM."

One of the more interesting new features, from an administration perspective, is a new Hybrid Cloud User Console. It lets administrators provision, monitor and manage cloud resources from one interface. For example, a cloud administrator can check the status of development and test workloads running in Eucalyptus, then shift their view to production workloads running on AWS. The cloud administrator can take action in either cloud, such as provisioning additional resources or adjusting scaling policies.

"Many companies are finding that the economics of private clouds make this approach a compelling choice for workloads such as development and testing," Al Hilwa, Program Director, Application Development Software at IDC said, in a statement. "Private clouds enable users to accurately predict and manage costs, while ensuring a high level of control over performance, policies and service levels."

The folks at Eucalyptus have done a good job of emphasizing private cloud capabilities as a differentiator between their platform and AWS. As I've noted before, OpenStack is getting increasing criticism for not having enough API compatibility with AWS. 

"With Eucalyptus 3.4, customers have the power to reduce cloud costs while gaining greater control over cloud performance, scale and security," said Andy Knosp, vice president of product at Eucalyptus, in a statement. "A single Eucalyptus private cloud can pay for itself in as little as three months. For organizations that need to dynamically scale their workloads to the public cloud, our compatibility with AWS allows companies to leverage this approach when it makes the most business sense."

You can visit visit Eucalyptus Systems' What's New page for additional information about enhancements and new features.