Eucalyptus Moves to GitHub

Eucalyptus Systems has updated its IaaS (infrastructure as a platform) cloud computing software so that computing jobs may be started more easily.

The open source Eucalyptus 3.1, to be released June 27, will also be the first version to be available on the GitHub online repository of open source software, providing a central place for developers to work on the code.

Developed by a University of California researcher, Eucalyptus is a cloud software platform that reproduces the Amazon Web Services API (application programming interface). With this software, organizations could duplicate AWS internally, allowing them to move jobs easily between Amazon and an in-house system. In March, Amazon announced that it would support development of Eucalyptus.

This release builds on version 3.0, released last August. It's the first to come with FastStart, a provisioning service that allows an administrator to get a cloud computing job running within 20 minutes, the company claims. Virtual machines are kept in a library so they can be easily deployed. The software also includes a suite of installation tools, called SilverEye, for advance installation and configuration of the virtual images. FastStart works on CentOS 5 Linux distribution with the Xen hypervisor, or CentOS 6 with Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.

This version of the software has been updated to work with the latest versions of other platforms as well. It can now run on the latest version of with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), allowing users to deploy either Xen or KVM-based virtual machines on RHEL servers. Users can run Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Identity and Access Management (IAM) services on RHEL. Eucalyptus 3.1 has also been engineered to work with VMware's virtualization management software, vCenter version 5.

The move to GitHub should bring more community participation in the further development of the software, the company predicts. Eucalyptus Systems sells an enterprise version of the software with additional proprietary management features, though the company also shepherds the development of the open-source core of the program, called Eucalyptus Community Cloud. Placing the codebase on GitHub will centralize the development activity in one public location, as well as allow Eucalyptus users to file requests for new features and bug fixes, and watch their progress through the development cycle. Defects and new features will be tracked with a copy of the Jira project tracker.