EUCALYPTUS – Your own Private AWS Cloud

If you need a Private Cloud solution that’s AWS Compatible, gives you the needed control & security and at the same time provides infinite scalability, faster time to market & workload portability for your applications, then EUCALYPTUS is the answer.

Eucalyptus an acronym for “Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems”, is an open source cloud platform that lets you create a private cloud to provide Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) using commodity hardware and which is most importantly AWS compatible.

The core components of Eucalyptus namely the Cloud Controller, Walrus, Cluster Controller, Storage Controller & Node Controller follow a distributed architecture to convert your existing virtualized infrastructure into a highly scalable, efficient, and secure pool of resources. An optional component called the VMware Broker let’s you use VMware for your cloud environment too. And what you get from all this is a set of services in the areas of Compute, Storage & Networking with Security, higher Automation & easy Management; all of which are AWS compatible. Even the terminologies used are similar to AWS.

Some important services are:

• Instances
• Object Storage
• Elastic Block Storage
• Elastic IPs

And now some of the key features of Eucalyptus:

• Supports hypervisors like KVM & VMware vSphere
• Hybrid Cloud Management (Eucalyptus & AWS resource management from a single interface)
• VM Image Management
• Snapshots
• Security Groups
• Key Pair
• Networking Modes
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Auto Scaling
• CloudWatch
• Identity & Access Management
• AD and LDAP Integration
• Warm Upgrades & Zero Downtime Maintenance
• High Availability
• AWS Compatible API

Eucalyptus also provides Euca2ools written in Python, which is a set of command line tools for interacting with web services and are AWS compatible.

Eucalyptus is easy to obtain and install too, it comes as a core component with Ubuntu Enterprise cloud and installs without needing any modifications in major Linux distributions like RHEL, CentOS and Debian.

A formal agreement between AWS and Eucalyptus means you are able to effortlessly move workloads between cloud environments, and you continue receiving broader compatibility with AWS APIs.

Now the benefits:

• Hybrid Cloud
• Reduced public cloud expenditure & increased in-house IT asset utilization
• Use of existing AWS skills, resources and tools
• Achieve greater compliance and standardization
• Streamlined development and testing process for your applications
• Increased productivity & Faster time-to-market for your applications
• Seamless portability of your applications between the test/dev environments to production.
• Hassle-free workload migration between your private and public cloud

In a nutshell it’s your own PRIVATE AWS CLOUD.

Stay tuned for more on Eucalyptus.

WRITTEN BY Sangram Rath