The cloud computing cognoscenti seem to remain convinced that Citrix's CloudStack and OpenStack are gearing up for a battle that will leave one and only one winner. Meanwhile, there seems to be little discussion going on at all surrounding other cloud computing platforms, such as Eucalyptus. There are some good reasons to believe that--just as Windows, Mac and Linux users all rely on separate operating systems--multiple cloud infrastructure bets will pay off. Here are just a few reasons why.

Eucalyptus, which has been an innovator on the cloud computing scene ever since its early days as a university project at U.C. Santa Barbara, is now in a broad partnership with Amazon.

According to a statement from Eucalyptus: "AWS and Eucalyptus announced an agreement that enables customers to more efficiently migrate workloads between their existing data centers and AWS while using the same management tools and skills across both environments. As part of this agreement, AWS will support Eucalyptus as they continue to extend compatibility with AWS APIs and customer use cases. Customers can run applications in their existing datacenters that are compatible with popular Amazon Web Services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)."  Especially as it is facing stiff competition from OpenStack, this is a good move for Eucalyptus.

  Eucalyptus Systems is moving ahead with a new version of its private and hybrid cloud platform. The company's cloud platform, which OStatic has followed since its origins as an unsung cloud experiment out of U.C. Santa Barbara, has advanced with the release of Eucalyptus 3: the third generation of Eucalyptus' on-premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing software. Eucalyptus first gained notoriety for allowing people to easily build hybrid private and public cloud deployments based very closely on Amazon's cloud interface conventions. Since then, Eucalyptus has branched out to helping company's strategize around their cloud deployments, and is led by Marten Mickos, of MySQL fame.

Rich Wolski, Eucalyptus Systems' CTO and co-founder (who was part of the U.C. Santa Barbara team that gave birth to the Eucalyptus project), caught up with OStatic for a Q&A on what's under the hood in version 3. Here are his thoughts.