Thanks for that – it’s always useful to get insight from those who’ve been making this stuff work for them for real.

I agree that the API compatibility with Amazon is a key feature, and said so in the post. I am actually surprised that more people don’t use it in exactly the way you describe. It seems an obvious and valuable mode of working to me, and one that surely should ease some of the public/hybrid/private transitions that potential beneficiaries of the cloud occasionally get so agitated about.

Paul

Many thanks for a thoughtful and informative response.

I should stress the points I made about the apparent viability of Eucalyptus *Systems* – there seems to be clear scope to offer a range of professional services around the deployment and configuration of private clouds, whether based upon Eucalyptus or some other code line.

Eucalyptus itself was – and remains – impressive. I remember hearing about it originally from Rich, and have continued to see it as an interesting and viable technological solution to the delivery of private clouds.

The real issue, then, may be the one to which you refer in your response; despite a viable model and fit-for-purpose technology, others (and OpenStack must feature highly here) have more successfully captured the imagination. Whether that is simply within the press/analyst/clouderati community or more broadly amongst real customers is something we might usefully explore in more depth.

I shall continue to watch Eucalyptus with interest, and look forward to you being able to put my concerns at rest with a series of successes in the coming months.

Paul

With that disclaimer in place:

The fact that the Euca APIs are the same as AWS was a crucial selling point for us. We started on AWS entirely and then built out server capacity inside the firewall. Steady state, we’ve got the capacity we need to handle automatic build/test on Eucalyptus. The ability to lay our hands on physical servers matters to us, because Hadoop needs that sometimes. Because we use the AWS APIs, we can burst out to the public cloud and run on EC2 when the workload spikes. It’s an ideal combination.

Equally, access to the enterprise software and support package has been important.

I think it’s great that alternative cloud infrastructure layers are evolving right now. It’s too early for the industry to settle on just one. Canonical is pushing hard to grow its datacenter and server business in a market that has really been defined by Red Hat. Canonical’s cloud offering is obviously a key part of that strategy. I like the fact that there’s a vibrant community around OpenStack, but the Ubuntu endorsement notwithstanding, it’s way too early to nominate a single winner among the cloud abstraction layers. We need more years of experience before that happens.

Right now, I still like Euca best. It’s the most mature project, for sure, and the commercial focus of the vendor behind it is driving the platform forward at a pace and in a direction that lets us plan the future of the systems we run it on. AWS is a good choice for APIs.

Mike Olson
CEO, Cloudera
@mikeolson

I am seeing an entirely different world from where I am. We have seen 25,000 Eucalyptus cloud start up all over the world, and growth continues. We have production installations dating back 2 years by now. We are in generation 2 of our GA’d product, and this summer you will see the third major release. Puma, InterContinental Hotels, Aeorspace Corporation, USDA, NSA and others are happy users with expanding clouds. Our business is growing faster than before and faster than planned.

We face competition in the market, but this is mainly from VMware’s vCloud Director and from Abiquo and Cloud.com (and sometimes from CA). OpenStack is far from production readiness. Hardening software for mission-critical production use is hard.

As all of us private cloud software vendors race into the future, it will be interesting to see where each one ends up. We think we are stronger than ever before, and moving faster. But apparently we have been unable to convey that picture to everyone, for which I apologize. I will take it as my duty to do a better job presenting and representing Eucalyptus. In the meantime, please check out our website for webinars, videos and other interesting content, which we are now adding faster than before.

Thanks for listening and with kind regards,

Marten Mickos
CEO, Eucalyptus
marten@eucalyptus.com
http://twitter.com/martenmickos