Eucalyptus is just one of many efforts to create an open source software platform that mimics Amazon's massively popular Elastic Compute Cloud, a web service that offers instant access to virtual servers. But the southern California company believes it's in a unique position. For one, it has a partnership with Amazon. And two, it just moved its open source project to GitHub, a particularly attractive hangout for open source types across the world.
Eucalyptus announced the move to GitHub on Tuesday, as it unveiled a new version of its software platform. According to CEO Marten Mickos -- the former chief exec at open source database outfit MySQL -- the move underlines the company's commitment to making its entire platform freely available to anyone who wants to use it.
"We've really simplified it for our users, contributors, and partners -- and whoever have that technical interest in going all the way into our source code," Mickos tells Wired. "We know that some of the brightest minds in this world will have an interest in working on [the source code] and that will be to the benefit of themselves and to [Eucalyptus]."
Nominally, the Eucalyptus platform has always been open source, but the company's commitment to the open source ethos was called into question two years ago when NASA dropped the platform, claiming that it was prevented from making changes to the source code. Mickos always denied these claims, but since then, the company has changed the way it operates.
Previously, it offered multiple versions of the platform, and some included proprietary code you couldn't get from the open source version. Now, the company has consolidated all the code and made it available on GitHub, a popular third-party online code repository that encourages collaboration among developers.
But the company still faces stiff competition. After dropping Eucalyptus, NASA helped found the OpenStack project, another open source platform that lets you build your own version of Amazon EC2 inside your own data center, and Citrix has its weight behind another open source project called CloudStack.
In open sourcing their code, these projects hope to encourage widespread adoption, and many believe that OpenStack is in the best position to do so. OpenStack is overseen by a broad range of companies, including Rackspace, Cisco, Dell, and Nicira, and according to Joe Arnold -- the CEO of a San Francisco company called SwiftStack that works closely with the OpenStack project -- it's one of the only examples of an open source project where the control is spread evenly among many participants.
But Mickos will also tell you that Eucalyptus is the only company that has inked a deal with Amazon. The idea is to let businesses build a "private cloud" in their own data center with Eucalyptus that lets them seamlessly move applications onto Amazon's "public cloud," which operates on the web.
In short, a business can run applications on their Eucalyptus cloud, but when traffic spikes and they need more horse power or storage, they can tap into Amazon too.
Eucalyptus, says Mickos, has always mimicked the APIs, or application programming interfaces, used by Amazon's service, and he indicts that the company will expand the number of Amazon APIs it mimics in the future. Mickos also says the platform will eventually play nicely other cloud services as well. "We know there will always be a need to run some workloads on premise and that's what we're catering to," he says. "Today, there is just one [Amazon]. When the time comes that this changes and some other public cloud vendor becomes significant, we will support such APIs as well."
Asked who that challenger may be, Mickos laughs. "So many are trying," he says. "It really is an open game."
Update: This story has been updated to clarify the situation involving Eucalyptus and the Amazon APIs.
