Ubuntu 9.10 to get into the cloud in a big way with Eucalyptus and Amazon EC2.

The next version of Ubuntu Linux (9.10 code named Karmic Koala) it has been announced,will be very cloud oriented. This starts with their continuation of work to make it easy to deploy to Amazon AWS EC2 but extends beyond  that to incorporate the Eucalyptus Project in their server version.

EUCALYPTUS, which stands for “Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems” is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. In simpler terms it is an open source version of Amazon’s EC2.

What this will mean is that Ubuntu server will have the tools required to create your very own cloud computing compute cloud built in. So making your very own internal cloud will get both easier to implement and easier to support.

The Eucalyptus Project

Eucalyptus is on version 1.3 and it includes the following features:

• Interface compatibility with EC2 (both Web service and Query interfaces)
• Simple installation and deployment using Rocks cluster-management tools
• Stand-alone RPMs for non-Rocks RPM based systems
• Secure internal communication using SOAP with WS-security
• Overlay functionality requiring no modification to the target Linux environment
• Basic “Cloud Administrator” tools for system management and user accounting
• The ability to configure multiple clusters, each with private internal network addresses, into a single Cloud.

The interface compatibility is important as it means that theoretically, the tools that already exist for managing Amazon EC2 should work on your internal Eucalyptus cloud. having Ubuntu put some of their weight behind the project will probably mean that the development progresses at pace and it will be simplified further and made more stable, ready for a production environment.

Eucalyptus Cloud Achitecture

Ubuntu involvement also means that support for a solution built on Eucalyptus is going to be less risky, Ubuntu is quickly establishing itself in the server space (as it did in the desktop Linux market initially) and proving a clean easy, stable server operating system.

As management tools for Amazon EC2 continue to mature, we can expect Eucalyptus to benefit also via that compatible interface. This will add value to Eucalyptus as a solution potentially.

Eucalyptus uses XenServer for it’s virtualisation back-end, so as Citrix have released more features into the wild, we can expect Eucalyptus to be able to achieve some very clever feats in the next couple of years.

It might be a good time to look at Eucalyptus and XenServer and perhaps start some trials now, so that when Ubuntu 9.10 is released you are well positioned to use it in your own internal cloud solutions.