Your Own, Personal Cloud

RightScale, the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbar and Ubuntu are launching a tag-team assault on the cloud paradigm. Based on Xen infrastructures and Amazon EC2 control syntax (Amazon Web Services, AWS), the Eucalyptus platform is designed to be a work-alike, elastic cloud building block to promote private cloud confederations.

Starting with Ubuntu 9.04, RightScale will support private cloud management from their web management platform to your Eucalyptus cloud with registration built-into the Eucalyptus install. Why Ubuntu 9.04? Because it is the first distribution to ship with the Eucalyptus technology preview.

Billed as the "Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud" platform, the Ubuntu+Eucalyptus+RightScale triumvirate will allow emulate the EC2 environment and control the hardware build-out as well. Future updates will allow ServerTemplates and automation from RightScale, but this is a "preview" after all.

Some strong points about the Eucalyptus cloud:

• 2-4 times better TCP throughput than EC2


• AppScale (Google AppEngine) can deploy to it


• Runs on Xen and open source

Currently, there is no planned support for non-Linux operating systems, so Windows users will need to look to other technologies. However, if this project delivers, the air between public and private clouds could be getting a lot thinner.