An Assessment of Eucalyptus Version 1.4
Date
2009-05-06T14:58:50Z
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Abstract
Cloud Computing is the emergent technology that promises on-demand, dynamic and easily accessible computing power. The “pay-as-you-use” scheme is attractive for small to medium sized businesses as these
organizations are less inclined to purchase large amounts of physical machines to satisfy their immediate
computing needs. Various cloud services are already available on the market. Many of them implement
some form of dynamic provisioning of computing resources through the use of Virtual Machine (VM) tech-
nologies like Xen [13], VMWare [28] or KVM [16]. Among them, the Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2) [3] can
be considered the most popular and mature solution.
Eucalyptus [20], a cloud enabling infrastructure is the result of a research project from the University
of California, Santa Barbara. Eucalyptus stands for “Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking
Your Programs To Useful Systems”. It aims to provide a simple to set up cloud solution for the research
and development of cloud driven applications. By combining common web-service, Linux tools and the
Xen Virtual Machine Hypervisor, Eucalyptus successfully implemented partial functionality of the popular
Amazon EC2. As a consequence of recreating a “free” version of EC2, this open source project has attracted
much attention and it is scheduled to be included into Ubuntu 9.10 (code name Karmic Koala) [15], the
to-be-release version of a popular Linux distribution.
This document records a recent effort to evaluate Eucalyptus as a viable open source solution to cloud
computing. The evaluation focuses on the design, setup, usability and performance of Eucalyptus. In
Section 2, we discuss the general design goals and infrastructure layout of Eucalyptus. Section 3 documents
the process of setting up a Eucalyptus environment. Section 4 covers the usage and general impressions of
Eucalyptus’s functionalities. In Section 5, we developed a demonstrator to illustrate the potential real-world
usage of Eucalyptus v1.4. Finally in Section 7 and 8, we provide some related work and a conclusion to this
document.
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Keywords
Cloud computing