Eucalyptus - your open platform for creating the Elastic Cloud Platform

Now in the field of hosting, especially when it comes to high-load and scaling systems, there are not many options. One of the alternatives to conventional clusters or simply multi-server solutions is the use of the Elastic Clouds system - in fact, a virtual cloud of computing resources that runs on a distributed cluster, and inside it provides processor and data storage resources, as well as I / O, while scaling your system can be almost unlimited and unnoticeable. This is the meaning of the word Elastic in the definition - we can at any time flexibly scale the system, based on our needs, while not dependent on a specific hardware or other resources.

In the hosting market, the main players are, no doubt, Amazon with its services (in this context, we mean its EC2 platform ), the recently released Google App Engine and the announced Aptana Cloud, which is still closed for participation (however, there are already first reviews we wrote about them ). Each project has its own approach to the implementation of the “cloudiness” concept, but probably the most versatile and complete solution is Amazon EC2. By the way, there are already a few introduction reviews in Russian in the subject, so I will only give links (for example, this one or this one ). If superficially and briefly, then Amazon provides complete virtualization for the execution of user tasks, that is, you are not deploying your scripts in the cloud (as the Google App Engine suggests, by the way, there is a brief overview about its pros and cons ) and specially collected virtual machine images which you can prepare at yourselves, and then unroll for execution on the Amazon servers. Such an approach is very flexible and does not limit users in any way in the used sets of applications and libraries; it will allow focusing on WHAT to do, rather than deal with restrictions, and fall in trying to solve HOW.

But. Do you think that Amazon and only eat? No, it turned out that now there was also a solution that allows you to independently deploy not only virtualization of this level, but also build your own fully open Elastic Cloud platform.
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The project EUCALYPTUS - Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Your Systems Provides an open implementation of the cloud platform, which, by the way, is compatible with the format of images for Amazon EC2, so you can compare both systems very easily, as well as transfer applications if you suddenly start own hosting.

Technologically, EUCALYPTUS works on top of a cluster running the Rock Cluster system (it is required to install the system, in the future there will be a release that does not require additional tools) and requires Xen 3.0.2 virtualization platform to be deployed. Now the system is distributed as two images for deployment via Rock on all cluster nodes (I wonder if this system can be deployed on one physical server, for example, in two VirtualBox virtual machines, for testing). To manage our cloud, a web interface is available in which we can distribute rights to other users who will host their virtual machines for execution in the cloud environment. By the way, we have already mentioned that the images are compatible with those used in the Amazon, and you can create them using the same tools, and such a move looks the most reasonable - the creators of EUCALYPTUS killed, as they say, two birds at once. They saved their time, creating their own image format and supporting it, saving time for users, they do not need to create different images of the same, and they also got all the developed infrastructure for creating images, which Amazon prepared for itself. And testing such a solution is now much easier, although, of course, at this stage, not all the functionality is supported .

While the source code of the project is not available, although it is fully open (under the BSD license) and is declared as open source. In particular, the documentation states that the deployment of such a system from source codes is now very complicated and “wrong”, therefore, so far only available images are available ( in the original, it sounds like this: This is the state of the system .

Despite the youth of the project (on May 29, the first version, however, immediately at number 1.0) and not all the functionality, the system is already of research interest, and even commercial - it is quite possible to deploy it on a small cluster and provide hosting services for test projects, for example , in the development process to test the system, which in production will then be deployed on the services of Amazon EC2. We will wait for the appearance of available platforms in our market!

PS Material from my blog, original post here .