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Cloud Slice: Eucalyptus for Hybrid Clouds

Vishal Biyani
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What is Eucalyptus?

Eucalyptus is a platform which can enable you to use your existing hardware to build in house Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS). You don’t need to buy special hardware to build a private cloud. Eucalyptus is built with APIs similar to public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, so you can easily integrate private and public clouds.

So what is the deal?

Let’s do a quick roundup of some key features of Eucalyptus

  • You can use existing investment in variety of hardware to build a IaaS which will provide you compute and storage services. A self service console enables you to provision and configure compute, storage and other devices
  • You can seamlessly integrate with public clouds like AWS and more platforms will be supported in future. You can build for high availability and provision for hot failover and repairs
  • You can manage multiple hypervisor clusters from vSphere, ESX, KVM and XEN
  • Eucalyptus integrates well with SAN to provide on demand storage allocation and de-allocation. With an EBS like storage you can persist virtual machines including state for faster launch.

Public Cloud Integration

As of writing this article Eucalyptus provides seamless integration with some of well known Amazon Web Services (AWS) features like EC2, EBS, S3 etc.

How to test drive Eucalyptus?

FastStart is a pre-configured installation of Eucalyptus which you can run on your hardware. You can test drive Eucalyptus through their subscription where you have more options for hypervisor selection. You can also download the source code and play around with Eucalyptus here