Page 232 - 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

Web Services-compatible tools will work ‘out-of-the-box’ or
with minor customization” for building and tweaking applica-
tions designed for Nebula, according to information posted
on the Nebula Web site, nebula.nasa.gov. Virtual machines
designed to run in Nebula under the open source Xen or KVM
hypervisors can also be run in Amazon’s EC2, giving NASA

teams or NASA’s partners and research collaborators an al-
ternative site to run their applications. “By adopting Euca-
lyptus, we’ve bootstrapped the Nebula ecosystem with tools
and systems that were made for EC2 and will make many avail-
able for you to use with Nebula,” wrote JLindsay, an Ames
Research Center staffer working on Nebula, in a blog, “How
Eucalyptus Enables EC2 Compatibility with Nebula,” on No-

vember 16, 2009.
In short, Nebula developers have taken advantage of the
Amazon example and made use of an approach to cloud com-
puting that offers flexibility for the future. The open source
code is proven high-quality code and a way to avoid commer-
cial software license expenses. It’s also a shortcut to imple-
menting cloud computing goals. NASA Ames staffers will
produce more code to tie disparate open source code together
and gain greater integration. The results of the Ames staffers’

efforts will also be made open source code at some point in
the future.
“NASA specific additions will be given back to the open
source community. Nebula is intended to be a ‘good example’
of a successful large-scale open source project in the govern-
ment and pave the way for similar project in other agencies,”

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