Eucalyptus was originally known as one of the key open-source contenders in the battle for private cloud computing customers. Later, it became known as the company that broke with the pack to become compatible with AWS public cloud services, thus becoming a player in the world of hybrid cloud.
Now Eucalyptus moved to a 3.2 version with a new GUI that enables self-service, as well as simplified cloud administration and usage reporting.
The new GUI “allows users to perform self-service operations including the provisioning of instances, keypair and password creation, Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume and snapshot operations, image catalog listing and registration, user group operations, and elastic IP operations,” according to the company.
Eucalyptus 3.2 is more robust than previous versions as well, with the company stating its “load-test harness may handle up to 6000 concurrent connections to 20 test applications across multiple groups and phases of development.”
I asked Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos how he views the company’s positioning now and how much of 3.2’s improvements and enhancements came from customer feedback.
“Most of the new features came from customer requests,” he said. “One of our big
corporate customers asked for the VNX adapter, for example. The reporting and logging
was asked for by customers (in addition to other features).”
Mickos also said he thought that he and the company’s major competitors “each have our own sweetspot. We are the only AWS-compatible enterprise-focused cloud platform. OpenStack is popular among those who build their own cloud platform. CloudStack is popular among service providers. VMware’s vCloud Director is not very popular, but to the degree it is used, it is used by customers who have gone all-VMware.”