Eucalyptus moves back to full open source

CEO of cloud software company Eucalyptus, Marten Mickos, has announced that the next release of Eucalyptus will exist only as one edition, ending the company's open source/enterprise versions which gave it open core styled product differentiation. Eucalyptus 3.1 will bring the company's full range of technologies into one version and the source code will be available through Github. All new development activity will occur on Github too, with defect and feature tracking made publicly available making it easier for any community member to follow the progress of an issue.

As well as the change in development model, Eucalyptus 3.1 will feature new enterprise "on-premise cloud" deployments allowing the use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, running on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation or VMware virtualisation, to deploy EC2, S3, EBS and IAM compatible APIs for hybrid clouds. Another enhancement is FastStart, a self-service system that can be deployed on CentOS 5/Xen or CentOS 6/KVM and allows user to browse and install euStore images to the FastStarted cloud within 20 minutes.

The 3.1 release builds on version 3.0 which offered high-availability features, Amazon Web Services API extensions, rapid instancing, improvements to EBS (elastic block storage) and Windows image support, a redesigned administration console and better CLI admin tools. Eucalyptus signed a deal with Amazon in March which saw the companies agree to work on hybrid and on-premises clouds together. The company has been under increasing pressure with the visible rise of OpenStack and CloudStack projects which also offer IaaS cloud management.

Mickos pointed out that the Eucalyptus code was bringing "enterprise-grade cloud computing to the open source communities of the world", noting it had been used in production at customers such as "Puma, Inter-Continental Hotels Group, NIST, NASA, Cornell University, and others". The new release will be available to customers on 27 June and is licensed under the GPLv3. The 3.1 code is already visible on the company's GitHub repository.

(djwm)