Open-source cloud platform goes commercial

Eucalyptus, an open-source project aimed at making it possible to set up Amazon Web Services-compatible private cloud infrastructures, has established itself as a private company, Eucalyptus Systems.

The commercial venture has raised $5.5m in venture capital, Eucalyptus said in a statement on Wednesday. The idea behind the company is support the open-source platform and "deliver on-premise private and hybrid cloud computing solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments".

Eucalyptus (Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems), which recently became a component of the Ubuntu Linux server distribution, started life as a research project at the University of California.

Co-founder Rich Wolski said in Wednesday's statement that "Eucalyptus Systems will ensure the viability and growth of Eucalyptus well beyond its life as a university research project, while also extending the technology to meet the needs of organizations that require high scalability, reliability, and enterprise-grade support".

"Eucalyptus Systems will enable businesses of any size to leverage their own IT resources to get the benefits of cloud computing without the concerns of lock-in, security ambiguity, and unexpected storage costs that can be associated with public clouds," Wolski said.

Crucially, Eucalyptus appears to the be the only private cloud platform today that supports the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds - in this case the popular Amazon Web Services.

The company, which seems quite keen to tout the benefits of "hybrid" clouds, has a 'Quickstart program' for "organizations looking to partner with Eucalyptus experts on critical cloud infrastructure initiatives".

Also announced on Wednesday was a new website for Eucalyptus Systems, which can be found here.