Thinking Out Cloud

Does Eucalyptus Have a Commercial Future?

 The Eucalyptus project from Dr. Rich Wolski and his team at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) is one of the most interesting open source projects in cloud computing. Although it is a research project, I can't help but think about potential commercial applications for it.

The idea behind Eucalyptus -- which is actually an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems -- is quite simple: it is a frameowrk for implementing a cloud computing environment similar to Amazon Web Services. Taking EC2 as their first target, the team implemented many of the APIs and much of the functionality of EC2, such as the ability to bundle machine images and share them, the ability to deploy and kill machine image instances, user management on the cloud and so on. More advanced features such as Availability Zones are also supported, and reading through the discussion boards, it seems that more is on the way. The APIs, mind you, are compatible with Amazon's.

So what would be the use cases for such a system? Here's a few I came up with. 

1. Private Cloud for the Enterprise: Implement an Amazon EC2 -like infrastructure in-house. Seems to me that a lot more needs to be in place for this be a viable option.
2. Hybrid Cloud 
3. Cloud Portability 
4. Cloud Testing 
5. Public Cloud Framework for Hosting Services, ISPs and other providers

It would be really interesting to hear others thoughts on this. Right now I understand that the software is mostly used by those who mean to deploy on EC2 but want to perform development and testing in-house, mostly for cost-savings. That kind of makes you wonder...

Cloud Computing Podcast

James Urquhart (Wisdom of Clouds blog) and I are starting a new podcast series on cloud computing and related topics (virtualization, software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, utility and on-demand computing, etc.).

The series is entitled Overcast. We plan to do it at least on a weekly basis, discussing topics and news of the day. We're also planning on having guests join us -- namely notable executives, techies, analysts and bloggers active in the cloud computing space.

Check out the Overcast blog and listen to the first podcast: Show #1

Here are some of the topics we discuss in it:

• New features from Amazon Web Services, such as auto-scaling and load-balancing, and how it affects Amazon's eco-system of partners such as RightScale, GigaSpaces and others; as well as AWS coming out of beta and offering SLAs
• Microsoft Azure and whether or not it will help Microsoft attract non .Net developers to it
• CohesiveFT's new VPN-Cubed product
• IBM's announcement that they are offering Lotus Notes as software-as-a-service

We also discuss:

• The potential roles of IBM, HP and Sun in cloud computing
• The recent debate between Tim O'Reilly and Nick Carr on the Network Effect in cloud computing
• The notion of vendor "vision lock-in" -- announcements aimed at making potential customers take pause before selecting a cloud vendor
• and much more...

Please listen in and let James and me know what you think.

Also, you can: