Eualyptus Could Get a Second Chance by Joining OpenStack

A number of developments have unfolded at the OpenStack Design Summit this past week in San Antonio. We’ve been following the news, seeing a growing excitement about an effort that looks like it really is becoming a full-fledged movement that provides the foundation for an open cloud infrastructure.

Perhaps the most significant news comes from Eucalyptus Systems Co-Founder Graziano Obertelli who said he had been in discussions with Rackspace and OpenStack about how to work together.

That’s significant. Eucalyptus had earlier this summer distanced itself from OpenStack. It had actually at one time served as NASA’s partner in building its compute infrastructure.

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But that did not work out. NASA decided to build its own cloud infrastructure and eventually partnered with Rackspace, which provided its object storage capabilities to go with Nebula, the massive computing infrastructure built by the United States space agency.

Eucalyptus provides infrastructure as a service for the enterprise that want to create a cloud-type environment. It started as an open-source, academic project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After the project went into the market, the company took the code and created a commercial and community version. The community version is open-source. The enterprise variety has proprietary technology baked into it.

Joining OpenStack may be a second chance for Eucalyptus to gain acceptance again in the community.

Krishnan Subramanian of Cloud Ave. writes:

“Many perceived OpenStack to be an Open Source alternative to the Open Core Eucalyptus system. Ubuntu, which was closely aligned with Eucalyptus in their early cloud moves, seems to be showing interest on the OpenStack project In fact, some people (including myself) feel that it is an end of the road for Eucalyptus unless they do something drastic to spur interest among the community.”

Here’s Dell’s Barton George interviewing Obertelli about why he attended the Design Summit. In the video he discusses collaboration and working out the differences in the code. Eucalyptus is built on Java while OpenStack uses Python.

You can feel the energy build for OpenStack. Eucalyptus would give the open-source cloud initiative a clear path. It would allow it to grow without any concern about a competing open-source effort.

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