It’s beginning to look like you just can’t keep a good cloud down. The makers of the open-source cloud computing platform Eucalyptus today said they have raised $5.5 million in Series A funding, and they announced the launch of Eucalyptus Systems Inc. The new company will keep its basic cloud-building software entirely open source, but will supplement it with enterprise-class features support. Its first commercial release is scheduled for the third quarter of this year.
Eucalyptus offers some of the same benefits as public clouds to its private cloud customers by pooling existing data center resources and letting users self-provision instances on demand without going through the IT department. It uses an Amazon Web Services-compatible API by default but also works with other APIs, like GoGrid, and supports the Google App Engine API via support for the open-source AppScale project. Customers don’t get locked into Eucalyptus, because APIs can be mixed and matched, and apps can be ported seamlessly to their respective public platforms. And, because “the baseline functionality is yours right down to the source code,” Co-Founder and CTO Rich Wolski says customers who wish to are free to make their own fixes if Eucalyptus breaks (of course, they also can call Eucalyptus for support). Read more about the details here.
One potential issue for Eucalyptus is that its product currently does not offer functionalities like automatic scaling and live migration, features often associated with internal cloud offerings. Although Eucalyptus does have its own scheduler, Wolski said, “We’re really trying to stick with the functionality that we’ve seen in successful public clouds.” Amazon, he notes, does not inherently include what Wolski calls “data center virtualization” features. The problem is that — regardless of nuanced distinctions between true cloud computing and advanced virtualization offerings — many view cloud computing as a way to eliminate the complexities involved with writing dynamic capabilities like auto-scaling into their applications.
However, among Eucalyptus’ 14,000-plus users are corporate customers across different sectors, with which the company will be engaging in the months to come. Wolski said these customer engagements will help Eucalyptus understand how its product roadmap should unfold, and it now has $5.5 million to put toward development. Although the basic Eucalyptus offering is unique among commercial vendors (Globus Nimbus is a similar research project), offering advanced functionalities will help ensure success.
Last time we tried it, we hit a ‘documented’ bug which prevented us from creating new VMs very elementary for any cloud software. There is no SVN access to their development version since the bug was supposed to have been fixed there. There is no active community around the software, no mailing lists and empty forums where you can hear your own echo. Hopefully the VCs did their due diligence well about the 14K or so corporate users we are talking about here. Best of luck to the eucalyptus team however, hopefully they’ll run it like a true open source project and open up a bit more now that the funding is in place.
-Tarun
1 of the 14000 corporate downloaders of Eucalyptus
We are really sorry that Tarun had a negative experience. The software has gone through several releases and the latest release, available both as an RC from us and through the Ubuntu distribution, is reported to work in a variety of environments.
However, there seems to be some confusion in Tarun’s post regarding the availability of community resources. The original Eucalyptus web site was hosted at UCSB. Yesterday evening, we moved the site off the University infrastructure and into a better software framework — better particularly with respect to management of the discussion board. There were almost 2000 posts covering 460 topics and we have been working to incorporate them into the new infrastructure today. To avoid race conditions we temporarily disabled the email list and discussion board while the transfer is taking place. We announced the outage via the mailing list and the original discussion board yesterday morning and we’ll send mail to the mailing list and post something on the new discussion board when the posts have all been moved over to the new system.
As for SVN — we actually use bzr and launchpad. https://launchpad.net/eucalyptus There we make the most-up-to-date snapshot of the source available.
Cheers,
Rich
Hello Rich,
Thanks for your explanation. I guess that explains why I see less than a dozen posts at http://forum.eucalyptus.com/forum/ . Nothing on the old USCB site indicated the presence of any live mailing list or another forum or where the source repository existed. I guess we’ll give it another shot sometime soon.
Thanks for clarifying.
Best
-Tarun
So moving the posts from TRAC to Drupal took longer than we thought. Check out
http://forum.eucalyptus.com/forum/
again when you get the chance. We have all of the posts moved (I think) along with their original time stamps and we managed to preserve the user login information so that the registered users do not have to re-register. It took a couple nights’ worth of hacking but I think we are there now.
Cheers,
Rich
Cloud computing is a very interesting approach, although I don’t think it will become accepted without solving this problems.