UCSB Grad Students Put Cloud Computing Power into Ubuntu

A National Science Foundation grant project developed largely by graduate students at the University of California, Santa Barbara has resulted in Eucalyptus Systems, a three-month-old startup which has produced new open-source cloud infrastructure software that is a key component in Ubuntu’s upcoming 9.10 edition, Karmic Koala. Ubuntu is a popular Debian Linux-based open source operating system created by developer and Canonical Ltd. founder Mark Shuttleworth in 2004 that has been used increasingly in enterprise IT systems. Eucalyptus is an open-source software platform for developing on-premise private and hybrid clouds using a system’s existing hardware and software infrastructure, with no modifications. This is a little tricky to explain, so read this carefully: Karmic Koala [all Ubuntu releases are named after animals] is now in alpha testing and scheduled for general release in October 2009. Karmic Koala is the operating system of Ubuntu’s new cloud-building package called Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, which includes Eucalyptus. Canonical released a preview edition of the UEC in April.

Canonical is making no secret of the fact that since Eucalyptus enables enterprises to test, deploy and experiment with their own private, in-house clouds, it competes squarely with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) API. “The Eucalyptus project enables you to create an EC2-style cloud in your own data center, on your own hardware,” Shuttleworth wrote in his introduction to Karmic Koala in the Ubuntu users’ email list. “During the Karmic [Koala] cycle, we expect to make those clouds dance, with dynamically growing and shrinking resource allocations depending on your needs.

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