Open Source Cloud Computing: RightScale Joins Forces With Eucalyptus

"The combination of RightScale and Eucalyptus is an excellent way to achieve federation between public and private cloud platforms," said Rich Wolski, a professor in the Computer Science Department at UCSB and director of the Eucalyptus project. Wolski, an upcoming speaker at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo (November 19-21, San Jose, CA), made the comment as it was announced that RightScale has partnered with the Eucalyptus Project Team at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) to foster cloud computing research, experimentation and adoption.

"Deploying scalable, reliable applications from scratch in a multi-cloud world is a time consuming and expensive task," Wolski continued. "Eucalyptus makes it possible to use RightScale's top-quality management platform and expertise to make this easy and cost-effective for both a local IT infrastructure and many of the popular public clouds."

Eucalyptus, which stands for "Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems," is an open source software infrastructure for implementing cloud computing on clusters. The current interface to Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. Eucalyptus can be downloaded for free and installed on any set of servers to create a private, EC2-compatible cloud computing system on those servers.

We are honored to collaborate with the talented UCSB Eucalyptus Project Team to accelerate the advancement of cloud computing technology," said Michael Crandell, CEO at RightScale. "Now anyone - from those just becoming familiar with cloud computing to organizations evaluating a massive application for deployment on Amazon's EC2 - will be able to easily test their applications on the Eucalyptus EC2-compatible, open source cloud infrastructure using RightScale's management platform."

Starting today, the RightScale cloud computing management platform is available for use with the Eucalyptus Public Cloud (EPC), a cluster of servers at UCSB for testing and evaluating the Eucalyptus cloud infrastructure. RightScale and the Eucalyptus Project Team are also collaborating to deliver a more robust private cloud for organizations whose testing requirements extend beyond those offered by the EPC.

The RightScale-Eucalyptus partnership, Crandell noted, is aimed at making cloud computing simple and accessible to everyone from universities, students and entrepreneurs to enterprises evaluating large cloud deployments.

Eucalyptus has leveraged RightScale's widely used and proven interface with Amazon's EC2 to validate that the Eucalyptus infrastructure is fully compatible with EC2, he added.

Last month the company already announced a strategic initiative to become the first cloud management platform to deliver the integrated management of multiple cloud environments - so RightScale's support for Eucalyptus adds to an expanding list of supported clouds, which includes Amazon's EC2, FlexiScale and GoGrid.

SOURCE: RightScale