Page 115 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

THE HYBRID CL OUD

into servers and run on cue, invoking temporary storage or
permanent storage in your private cloud in a way that’s iden-
tical to EC2’s. Using the same APIs as EC2 leads to equipping
the private cloud with the same services found in the exter-
nal cloud. When the time comes to split the workloads be-
tween the two, it’s less of a coordination headache. Part of

the workload can be shipped off and run on its EC2 destina-
tion server the same as if it were still on premises. So far,
Eucalyptus supports a subset of the EC2 services, including
loading a virtual machine onto a server, enlisting Elastic
Block Store for temporarily storing the application and its
data, and tapping Simple Storage Service, also known as S3,
for long-term storage.

Eucalyptus is an open source project that grew out of the
University of California at Santa Barbara’s computer science
department under Professor Rich Wolski. It developed cloud
interfaces that closely mimic those provided by EC2. Amazon
Web Services regards its cloud APIs as proprietary, which pre-
vents other cloud suppliers from using them, but it appears to
have no objection to those who choose to use Eucalyptus’s
open source APIs. Amazon would like to see the EC2’s APIs
become as widely accepted as possible and has not challenged

or interfered with the operation of Eucalyptus’s APIs. If enter-
prises build private clouds using Eucalyptus, these operations
will be highly compatible with EC2, a development that Ama-
zon favors. Wolski, now CTO of the firm Eucalyptus Systems,
a company that he cofounded to build products around
the Eucalyptus APIs and expand them, says that he is highly

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