Aromatic Clouds?

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If you weren’t at OSGC you missed a number of interesting presentations. From my perspective, one of the most intriguing technologies was EUCALYPTUS: Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems.

Before I go on, I would like you to notice that anybody who is able to make an acronym out of eucalyptus has some time on their hands. Fortunately, they used this time to implement an open-source infrastructure for Elastic Computing. In particular, the goal of the project is to, "foster community research and development of Elastic/Utility/Cloud service implementation technologies, resource allocation strategies, service level agreement (SLA) mechanisms and policies, and usage models."

In my opinion, the most interesting facets of this project are:

  • It is compatible with the Amazon EC2 tools out of the box yet it is agnostic and thus is capable of supporting any number of client interfaces;
  • Any team can assemble a development environment for tools that they wish to deploy to the EC2 Cloud;
  • A group could create their own Cloud system which could use EC2 for Utility computing resources;
  • It is the first step towards creating an open-standard for Cloud computing.

My hope is that this project will not only get us all thinking about what we really need from a Cloud but also what we could improve... I plan to start working with this software as soon as it is available later this month.

منبع : http://gridgurus.typepad.com