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Indeed, Wolski says that Eucalyptus isn't meant to be an EC2 killer (for one thing, it's not designed to scale to the same size). However, he believes that the project can make a productive contribution by offering a simple way to customize programs for use in the cloud. Wolski says that it's easier to assess a program's performance when it's possible to see how it operates both at the interface and from within a cloud.
Wolski says that Eucalyptus will also imitate Amazon's popular Simple Storage Surface, which allows users to access storage space on demand, as well as its Elastic IP addresses, which keeps the address of Web resources the same, even if the physical location changes.
Ignacio Llorente, a professor in the distributed systems architecture group at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, in Spain, who works on OpenNebula, says that Eucalyptus's main advantage is that it uses the popular EC2 interface. However, he adds that "the open-source interface is only one part of the solution. Their back-end [the system's internal management of physical resources and virtual machines] is too basic. A complete cloud solution requires other components." Llorente says that Eucalyptus is just one example of a growing ecosystem of open-source cloud-computing components.
Wolski expects many of Eucalyptus's users to be academics interested in studying cloud-computing infrastructure. Although he doubts that such a platform would be used as a distributed system for ordinary computer users, he doesn't discount the possibility. "You can argue it both ways," he notes. But Wolski says that he thinks some open-source cloud-computing tool will become important in the future. "If it's not Eucalyptus, I suspect [it will be] something else," he says. "There will be an open-source thing that everyone gets excited about and runs in their environment."
Cryptography solutions are far-off, but much can be done in the near term, says Whitfield Diffie.
Software developed by rPath makes it easier to port applications to the cloud.
A startup hopes to make it easier to hop between cloud-computing services.
well written, cloud computing is definitely growing bigger each day, but the key point i would think is the application base and performance. performance of running apps off the web definitely is slower than running it off natively, partly due to the network bandwidth bottleneck.
i would say there's still demand for non cloud applications, recently a startup hibernater.com launched some sort of offline "cloud" app which enables users to save and resume their work easily, kind of hibernating through the internet using existing applications. pretty cool...
Clouds make lightning, thunder, and rain!
It is all about performance!
Cloud computing is dependant on the performance of the web, the software, the local machine and the browser itself. Not to mention the performance of the technical support department.
The key cloud computing that works, saves money, and time is to host the original software in a band-width independent environment with no dependency on the local machine. This affords the user of all the benefits of cloud computing without changing the way they work.
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On the subject of open source clouds, you may be interested in GroundOS. It looks to be competition to EC2, Azure, and Google App Engine.
Cloud computing really is a technology for the future. I really like the word "Cloud". It explained almost all characteristics of cloud computing.
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Paul_Miller
3 Comments
Open Source tools to keep the incumbents honest?
Erica,
many thanks for this overview of open source tools, which came at just the right time for me to use it in making a point on a related blog post - http://cloudofdata.com/2008/11/cloud-computing-is-so-much-more-than-a-computer-in-the-cloud/
Many of these tools, at least today, aren't really a viable alternative to the offerings of Amazon et al for most business users. They do serve as useful testbeds for the next generation of Cloud services, though, and (as I mention in the post) they will presumably be vital in preventing any of the current commercial providers from getting too big or too powerful.
As Tom Bittman notes over at Gartner (http://blogs.gartner.com/thomas_bittman/2008/11/03/the-evolution-of-the-cloud-computing-market/) we need to move away from today's proprietary approach to Cloud technologies if this market is to achieve its potential. Viable open source alternatives are a powerful driver there.
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