Eucalyptus (computing)
Encyclopedia
Eucalyptus is a software platform for the implementation of private cloud computing
on computer clusters
. There is an open-core enterprise edition and an open-source edition. Currently, it exports a user-facing interface that is compatible with the Amazon EC2 and S3
services but the platform is modularized so that it can support a set of different interfaces simultaneously. The development of Eucalyptus software is sponsored by Eucalyptus Systems, a venture-backed start-up. Eucalyptus works with most currently available Linux distributions including Ubuntu
, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS
, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
(SLES), openSUSE
, Debian
and Fedora
. It can also host Microsoft Windows
images. Similarly Eucalyptus can use a variety of virtualization technologies
including VMware
, Xen
and KVM
hypervisors to implement the cloud abstractions it supports. Eucalyptus is an acronym for “Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems”.
. In January 2009, a company named Eucalyptus Systems, Inc. was founded to support the commercialization of the Eucalyptus Cloud Computing platform.
(Infrastructure as a Service) style private and hybrid clouds. The platform provides a single interface that lets users access computing infrastructure resources (machines, network, and storage) available in private clouds—implemented by Eucalyptus inside an organizations's existing data center
—and resources available externally in public cloud services. The software is designed with a modular and extensible Web services-based architecture that enables Eucalyptus to export a variety of APIs towards users via client tools. Currently, Eucalyptus implements the industry-standard Amazon Web Services (AWS)
API, which allows the interoperability of Eucalyptus with existing AWS services and tools. Eucalyptus provides its own set of command line tools called Euca2ools, which can be used internally to interact with Eucalyptus private cloud installations or externally to interact with public cloud offerings, including Amazon EC2.
Eucalyptus includes these features:
Eucalyptus Components
Cloud Controller (CLC) - The CLC is responsible for exposing and managing the underlying virtualized resources (machines (servers), network, and storage) via user-facing APIs. Currently, the CLC exports a well-defined industry standard API (Amazon EC2) and via a Web-based user interface.
Walrus - Walrus implements scalable “put-get bucket storage.” The current implementation of Walrus is interface compatible with Amazon’s S3 (a get/put interface for buckets and objects), providing a mechanism for persistent storage and access control of virtual machine images and user data.
Cluster Controller (CC) - The CC controls the execution of virtual machines (VMs) running on the nodes and manages the virtual networking between VMs and between VMs and external users.
Storage Controller (SC) - The SC provides block-level network storage that can be dynamically attached by VMs. The current implementation of the SC supports the Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) semantics.
Node Controller (NC) - The NC (through the functionality of a hypervisor) controls VM activities, including the execution, inspection, and termination of VM instances.
Enterprise Cloud (UEC), a cloud computing module provided with distributions of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system.
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....
on computer clusters
Cluster (computing)
A computer cluster is a group of linked computers, working together closely thus in many respects forming a single computer. The components of a cluster are commonly, but not always, connected to each other through fast local area networks...
. There is an open-core enterprise edition and an open-source edition. Currently, it exports a user-facing interface that is compatible with the Amazon EC2 and S3
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 is an online storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services. Amazon S3 provides storage through web services interfaces...
services but the platform is modularized so that it can support a set of different interfaces simultaneously. The development of Eucalyptus software is sponsored by Eucalyptus Systems, a venture-backed start-up. Eucalyptus works with most currently available Linux distributions including Ubuntu
Ubuntu (operating system)
Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...
, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS
CentOS
CentOS is a free operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux . It exists to provide a free enterprise class computing platform and strives to maintain 100% binary compatibility with its upstream distribution...
, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a Linux distribution supplied by SUSE and targeted at the business market. It is targeted for servers, mainframes, and workstations but can be installed on desktop computers for testing as well. New major versions are released at an interval of 3-4 years, while...
(SLES), openSUSE
OpenSUSE
openSUSE is a general purpose operating system built on top of the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported openSUSE Project and sponsored by SUSE...
, Debian
Debian
Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...
and Fedora
Fedora (operating system)
Fedora is a RPM-based, general purpose collection of software, including an operating system based on the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat...
. It can also host Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
images. Similarly Eucalyptus can use a variety of virtualization technologies
Hardware virtualization
Computer hardware virtualization is the virtualization of computers or operating systems. It hides the physical characteristics of a computing platform from users, instead showing another abstract computing platform...
including VMware
VMware
VMware, Inc. is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary ....
, Xen
Xen
Xen is a virtual-machine monitor providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently....
and KVM
Kernel-based Virtual Machine
Kernel-based Virtual Machine is a virtualization infrastructure for the Linux kernel. KVM supports native virtualization on processors with hardware virtualization extensions....
hypervisors to implement the cloud abstractions it supports. Eucalyptus is an acronym for “Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems”.
History
Eucalyptus began as a research project in the field of high performance computing (HPC) under the direction of Professor Rich Wolski in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa BarbaraUniversity of California, Santa Barbara
The University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a site in Goleta, California, from Santa Barbara and northwest of Los...
. In January 2009, a company named Eucalyptus Systems, Inc. was founded to support the commercialization of the Eucalyptus Cloud Computing platform.
Features
Eucalyptus implements IaaSIAAS
IAAS can refer to the following:*Incorporated Association of Architects and Surveyors, British professional body renamed 1993 as the Association of Building Engineers* Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science, institute of Tribhuvan University, Nepal...
(Infrastructure as a Service) style private and hybrid clouds. The platform provides a single interface that lets users access computing infrastructure resources (machines, network, and storage) available in private clouds—implemented by Eucalyptus inside an organizations's existing data center
Data center
A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems...
—and resources available externally in public cloud services. The software is designed with a modular and extensible Web services-based architecture that enables Eucalyptus to export a variety of APIs towards users via client tools. Currently, Eucalyptus implements the industry-standard Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services is a collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com...
API, which allows the interoperability of Eucalyptus with existing AWS services and tools. Eucalyptus provides its own set of command line tools called Euca2ools, which can be used internally to interact with Eucalyptus private cloud installations or externally to interact with public cloud offerings, including Amazon EC2.
Eucalyptus includes these features:
- Compatibility with Amazon Web Services API.
- Installation and deployment from source or DEB and RPM packages.
- Secure communication between internal processes via SOAPSOAPSOAP, originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks...
and WS-Security. - Support for Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs)Virtual machineA virtual machine is a "completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system". Modern virtual machines are implemented with either software emulation or hardware virtualization or both together.-VM Definitions:A virtual machine is a software...
. - Support for multiple clusters as a single cloud.
- Elastic IPs and Security Groups.
- Users and Groups Management.
- Accounting reports.
- Configurable scheduling policies and SLAs.
Eucalyptus Software architecture
The Eucalyptus cloud computing platform has five high-level components: Cloud Controller (CLC), Cluster Controller (CC), Walrus, Storage Controller (SC) and Node Controller (NC). Each high-level system component has its own Web interface and is implemented as a stand-alone Web service. This has two major advantages: First, each Web service exposes a well-defined language-agnostic API in the form of a WSDL document containing both the operations that the service can perform and the input/output data structures. Second, Eucalyptus leverages existing Web-service features such as security policies (WSS) for secure communication between components and relies on industry-standard web-services software packages.Eucalyptus Components
Cloud Controller (CLC) - The CLC is responsible for exposing and managing the underlying virtualized resources (machines (servers), network, and storage) via user-facing APIs. Currently, the CLC exports a well-defined industry standard API (Amazon EC2) and via a Web-based user interface.
Walrus - Walrus implements scalable “put-get bucket storage.” The current implementation of Walrus is interface compatible with Amazon’s S3 (a get/put interface for buckets and objects), providing a mechanism for persistent storage and access control of virtual machine images and user data.
Cluster Controller (CC) - The CC controls the execution of virtual machines (VMs) running on the nodes and manages the virtual networking between VMs and between VMs and external users.
Storage Controller (SC) - The SC provides block-level network storage that can be dynamically attached by VMs. The current implementation of the SC supports the Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) semantics.
Node Controller (NC) - The NC (through the functionality of a hypervisor) controls VM activities, including the execution, inspection, and termination of VM instances.
Products and Variants
Eucalyptus open source has been through multiple releases. The first Eucalyptus (version 1.0) was developed and released in the context of a research project at the University of California Santa Barbara. Eucalyptus open source version 1.5.2 was the first release of the software since the founding of the company Eucalyptus Systems, Inc. Releases of the open-source core of Eucalyptus are scheduled semi-annually for March and August.Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC)
Since version 1.5 Eucalyptus has been included in Ubuntu and is now the core element of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC). Since version 1.6.2 Eucalyptus has been included in Debian. In May 2011 Canonical decided to switch from Eucalyptus to OpenStack starting from Ubuntu 11.10. Support for Eucalyptus will be available, but OpenStack will be the default.Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EE)
Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EE) is a commercial offering based on the open source Eucalyptus.Deployment
Eucalyptus core software is available for installation from source or from binary DEB and RPM packages. It is also the core element of the UbuntuUbuntu (operating system)
Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...
Enterprise Cloud (UEC), a cloud computing module provided with distributions of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system.
See also
- Amazon EC2
- Cloud computing comparisonCloud computing comparison-General information:-Supported Hosts:-Features:...
- Nimbus (cloud computing)Nimbus (cloud computing)Nimbus is an open-source toolkit that, once installed on a cluster, provides an infrastructure as a Service cloud to its client via WSRF-based or Amazon EC2 WSDL web service APIs....
- OpenNebulaOpenNebulaOpenNebula is an open-source cloud computing toolkit for managing heterogeneous distributed data center infrastructures. The OpenNebula toolkit manages a data center's virtual infrastructure to build private, public and hybrid IaaS clouds...
- OpenStackOpenStackOpenStack is an IaaS cloud computing project by Rackspace Cloud and NASA. Currently more than 120 companies have joined the project among which are Citrix Systems, Dell, AMD, Intel, Canonical, SUSE Linux, HP, and Cisco...
- Cloud computingCloud computingCloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....
- Ubuntu OneUbuntu OneUbuntu One is a personal cloud service operated by Canonical Ltd.The service enables users to store files online and sync them between computers and mobile devices, as well as stream audio and music from cloud to mobile devices.- Features :...