Ubuntu Cloud Computing support
For some time we have been observing the Eucalyptus project, precisely since it was an open only project, there is also a recent commercial section to offer companies the support to switch their datacenter to Cloud Computing logic.
The project was born as an emulation of Amazon’s Cloud Computing infrastructure, in the sense that it makes it possible to privately recreate the services that Amazon Web Service provides to the public, with the same APIs that are currently used on Amazon.
Obviously it cannot recreate all the services, currently it is limited to emulating the major services: EC2 S3 EBS, supporting Xen and KVM hypervisors
Of considerable interest is the attention and bet that Canonical , the company that supports the development of Ubuntu, towards the Eucalyptus project, supporting it and providing commercial support to the development of a Private Cloud Computing for companies, this year will also be present at VMworld2009 in San Francisco which will be held in these days.
Ubuntu Server 9.04 in addition to supporting Eucalyptus, also natively supports the Amazon Web Services API, thus making it easier for administrators to manage Cloud Computing services and thus opening the door to the creation of a true Hybrid Cloud between Eucalyptus and AWS. In addition, it is worth noting the commercial platform LandScape by Canonical which, in addition to being an excellent monitoring and system management platform, also supports the management of the Cloud Computing infrastructure, even if it does not refer to Eucalyptus but only AWS.
What, however, we do not explain is why the Ubuntu support project stops at the KVM hypervisor and not at Xen, this represents a strong limitation, because it would prevent any migrations of AMI images between the Public Cloud and the Private Cloud and vice versa, features that other Open projects support very well, as they support the Xen hypervisor, much more widespread than KVM.
Below are two videos, the first an official presentation of the Ubuntu Cloud.
and the other a very funny and very insightful presentation by Simon Wardley, Software Services Manager at Canonical, at O’Reilly’s OSCON 09 Open Source Convention
