Page 142 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

whether the cloud vendor has exposed its format. Open
source code may prove to be one of the ways to gain mobility
between clouds.
The Eucalyptus Project, which we introduced earlier, is of-
fering cloud APIs that can mimic what the Amazon EC2 APIs
do in simple functionality, including loading a workload, call-

ing Simple Storage Services (S3), or employing the temporary
Elastic Block Store. Using these Eucalyptus APIs means that a
private cloud can interoperate with Amazon’s EC2. Amazon
must understand that it is in its interest to tolerate this open
source code as a way to extend the future reach of EC2. It has
made no move to block or otherwise object to the Eucalyptus
implementers.

Ubuntu, the Linux-based open source operating system
from Canonical, now includes the Eucalyptus open source
code as part of its package. Canonical and Eucalyptus Systems,
the firm formed from the Eucalyptus Project, offer consulting
services on how to build a private cloud that is compatible
with Amazon’s.
Eucalyptus Systems is extending what the project’s origi-
nal open source code can do with additional proprietary
products. The Eucalyptus APIs originally supported use of

open source code hypervisors only [known as Kernel-based
Virtual Machine (KVM) and Xen]. The product, Eucalyptus
Enterprise Edition, adds support for VMware’s ESX Server hy-
pervisor. Enterprise Edition thus could become a widely used
building block of the private cloud. In the past, a wall existed
between VMware’s virtual machines, which are built in a VMDK
file format, and EC2’s Amazon Machine Image (AMI) format.

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