Eucalyptus Completes Amazon Web Services Specs with Latest Release

The Eucalyptus Project has reached a major milestone this week with the 1.6.2 release. While it mostly consists of minor improvements for performance and stability, the point release also marks the implementation of Amazon's EC2 and S3 specifications. Your private cloud is now ready!

Eucalyptus duplicates Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) services so that organizations can deploy cloud services compatible with AWS on their own hardware. According to the Eucalyptus documentation, users should be able to deploy their own cloud on anything from a personal laptop, to full-on data center infrastructure. The completion of the specifications means that it should be much easier for developers and organizations to move between AWS and Eucalyptus or simply to deploy their setups in-house entirely.

Now that the project has reached the full implementation of the specifications, the plan is to slow down releases to a steady six-month cycle. But that doesn't mean developers have to wait six months to get the latest code:

Also, as part of the new release schedule we will be publishing nightly builds for Eucalyptus so that the most current code base is available. Like with all open-source projects, these "nightlies" should be considered reference material and not stable, supported software, particularly since it will not be possible to conduct long-term stress tests on each nightly build. Feature releases and any bug-fix releases will be generated from the code base published as nightlies, however, so it is possible to track the evolution of the main development branch in this way.

The release also includes the Euca2ools 1.2 release. The Euca2ools suite includes command line tools that can work with Web services compatible with Amazon EC2 and S3. Even if you're not using a Eucalyptus implementation, users who have a Amazon cloud going might want to check out the Euca2ools for working with Amazon's services.

Downloads are available immediately from the Eucalyptus Community site, and include packages for CentOS, openSUSE 11, and Debian's current testing branch, "Squeeze." Source, of course, is also available.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a freelance writer and editor with more than 10 years covering IT. Formerly the openSUSE Community Manager for Novell, Brockmeier has written for Linux Magazine, Sys Admin, Linux Pro Magazine, IBM developerWorks, Linux.com, CIO.com, Linux Weekly News, ZDNet, and many other publications. You can reach Zonker at jzb@zonker.net and follow him on Twitter.