Eucalyptus (software)
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Cloud computing software |
| Founded | 2009 |
| Founder | Rich Wolski, Dan Nurmi, Neil Soman, Dmitrii Zagorodnov, Chris Grzegorczyk, Graziano Obertelli, Woody Rollins |
| Fate | Acquired by Hewlett-Packard in September 2014 |
| Successor | DXC Technology (maintenance), AppScale Systems (fork) |
| Headquarters | Goleta, California , United States |
Key people | Mårten Mickos (CEO), Rich Wolski (CTO) |
| Products | Eucalyptus cloud computing platform |
Number of employees | Not specified |
Eucalyptus is a commercial and open-source computer software platform designed for creating private and hybrid cloud computing infrastructures compatible with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Developed by Eucalyptus Systems, its name is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. The platform facilitates the flexible allocation and scaling of compute power, storage, and networking resources based on application demand. Leadership included CEO Mårten Mickos. In September 2014, Hewlett-Packard acquired Eucalyptus, with subsequent maintenance handled by DXC Technology. When DXC halted development in late 2017, the original Eucalyptus team at AppScale Systems forked the codebase to continue supporting its users.
History
The origins of the software trace back to the Virtual Grid Application Development Software initiative conducted at Rice University and additional institutions between 2003 and 2008. A team led by Rich Wolski at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) played a key role; Wolski later became CTO of the Goleta, California-based company before returning to academia.
In 2009, Eucalyptus was incorporated into the Ubuntu 9.04 operating system release. That same year, the company was established with $5.5 million in venture capital from Benchmark Capital to commercialize the platform.
The founding team comprised Rich Wolski (CTO), Dan Nurmi, Neil Soman, Dmitrii Zagorodnov, Chris Grzegorczyk, Graziano Obertelli, and Woody Rollins (CEO). By March 2012, Eucalyptus Systems had entered into a formal partnership with Amazon Web Services.
Hewlett-Packard completed its acquisition of Eucalyptus in September 2014; however, its public cloud offering, HPE Helion, was discontinued by late 2016. The Eucalyptus personnel were integrated into HPE Enterprise Services, which merged with Computer Sciences Corporation to form DXC Technology in April 2017. After DXC ended development and support for Eucalyptus that year, AppScale Systems—founded by members of the original Eucalyptus team—forked the project and has since advanced it commercially as AppScale ATS.
Software architecture
Eucalyptus provides command-line tools that administer both Amazon and Eucalyptus instances, allowing seamless migration of workloads between a private Eucalyptus cloud and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, supporting hybrid cloud configurations. Applications run within hardware virtualization environments that abstract underlying physical resources.
Fundamental components of Eucalyptus include:
- Images – Predefined collections of operating system and application software packaged as Eucalyptus machine images (EMI) ready for deployment.
- Instances – Executing images instantiated with runtime parameters; resource allocation including computing power, storage, and networking is managed by the Cloud Controller.
- IP addressing – Instances are assigned both public and private IP addresses upon launch. Elastic IP addresses provide persistent public IPs that can be pre-allocated and reassigned within the cloud environment.
- Security – TCP/IP security groups implement firewall policies to isolate instances by IP address and port number, ensuring network-level separation.
- Networking – Three operational modes exist: Managed Mode administers local network settings using security groups and elastic IPs; System Mode connects instances directly to physical networks without elastic IPs or isolation; Static Mode assigns fixed IP addresses without employing elastic IPs or security groups.
- Access Control – User identities are assigned and organized into groups for managing permissions and access rights.
Components
Eucalyptus is composed of six primary elements:
- The Cloud Controller (CLC) is a Java-based application that provides EC2-compatible and web interfaces for managing the cloud. It processes user API requests, handles resource allocation, manages system accounting, authentication, and enforces quotas. Each cloud environment contains only a single CLC.
- Also developed in Java, Walrus functions as Eucalyptus's counterpart to AWS S3, delivering persistent HTTP-accessible storage for virtual machines. It stores images, volume snapshots, and application data without restrictions on data types. There is only one Walrus per cloud.
- The Cluster Controller (CC), implemented in C, oversees instance lifecycle management and service level agreements within a cluster. It communicates with both the Storage Controller and Node Controller.
- The Storage Controller (SC), written in Java, acts similarly to AWS EBS by managing block storage volumes and snapshots within its cluster. For data persistence beyond the cluster boundary, instances rely on Walrus.
- The optional VMware Broker, operating on the Cluster Controller, offers an AWS-compatible interface tailored for VMware environments by converting Eucalyptus Machine Images into VMware virtual disks and facilitating communication between the Cluster Controller and VMware hosts or vCenter Server.
- The Node Controller (NC), coded in C, hosts virtual machine instances and manages virtual network interfaces. It downloads and caches images from Walrus to instantiate VMs. While multiple Node Controllers can exist within a cluster, system performance constraints apply.
Amazon Web Services compatibility
Organizations can govern their on-premises infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platforms using tools, images, and scripts compatible with AWS. By implementing the AWS API, Eucalyptus enables cloud ecosystem utilities designed for AWS to operate natively with its platform. In March 2012, Amazon Web Services and Eucalyptus jointly announced compatibility initiatives, with AWS endorsing Eucalyptus as it broadens API support and customer scenarios. This integration permits users to deploy applications within their own data centers that are interoperable with AWS services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).
The June 2013 release of Eucalyptus 3.3 introduced several AWS-compatible features including:
- Autoscaling – Allows developers to dynamically adjust Eucalyptus cloud resources to sustain performance levels and meet SLAs through EC2-compatible APIs.
- Elastic Load Balancing – Balances incoming application traffic across multiple Eucalyptus instances to improve fault tolerance.
- CloudWatch – A monitoring solution similar to Amazon CloudWatch that collects metrics, triggers alarms, and analyzes trends to ensure application reliability.
Additionally, Eucalyptus 3.3 became the first private cloud platform to support Netflix’s open source tools—Chaos Monkey, Asgard, and Edda—leveraging its precise API compatibility with AWS.
Functionality
The Eucalyptus User Console empowers users to provision and configure compute, network, and storage resources independently. Development and testing teams can manage virtual instances with integrated key management and encryption capabilities. Access methods include SSH and RDP protocols. Virtual instances configured with applications can be stopped and restarted utilizing encrypted boot from EBS-like volumes.
The IaaS components—Cloud Controller, Cluster Controller, Walrus, Storage Controller, and VMware Broker—can be configured redundantly to provide resilience against multiple failures. Management state is consistently saved and restored following hardware or software interruptions.
Eucalyptus supports a variety of Windows and Linux VM images. Users can create libraries of Eucalyptus Machine Images (EMIs) that separate application metadata from infrastructure details, facilitating portability across different Eucalyptus clouds. Compatibility extends to Amazon Machine Images as well as VMware Images/vApps convertible for use in both Eucalyptus and AWS environments.
User identity administration integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Active Directory or LDAP systems to deliver granular role-based access control over cloud resources.
To enhance performance and reliability, Eucalyptus supports storage area network (SAN) devices. EMIs can utilize persistent storage volumes akin to EBS to reduce launch times and enable fully persistent instance states. Direct-attached storage options are also supported.
Version 3.3 added AWS-compatible capabilities such as resource tagging, enabling developers and administrators to assign customizable metadata labels to firewalls, load balancers, servers, and workloads for improved identification. This version also expanded available instance types to align more closely with Amazon EC2 offerings.
Maintenance Mode was introduced in 3.3 for performing cloud upkeep without downtime. User console improvements included a Magic Search Bar feature alongside simplified password management options.
Eucalyptus 3.4, released in October 2013, brought enhancements including advanced image management and migration utilities, warm upgrade functionality, a hybrid cloud console capable of managing both Eucalyptus and AWS resources simultaneously, IAM roles support, and improved High Availability mechanisms.
Faststart demonstration configurations allow rapid deployment of private clouds through streamlined setup procedures.
Release history
| Version | Release Date |
|---|---|
| Eucalyptus 5.1.0 | May 10, 2021 |
| Eucalyptus 5.0.0 | December 15, 2020 |
| Eucalyptus 4.4.5 | December 28, 2018 |
| Eucalyptus 4.4.4 | July 9, 2018 |
| Eucalyptus 4.4.3 | April 30, 2018 |
| Eucalyptus 4.4.2 | August 30, 2017 |
| Eucalyptus 4.4.1 | May 9, 2017 |
| Eucalyptus 4.4.0 | March 7, 2017 |
| Eucalyptus 4.3.1 | December 14, 2016 |
| Eucalyptus 4.3.0 | August 9, 2016 |
| Eucalyptus 4.2.2 | April 28, 2016 |
| Eucalyptus 4.2.1 | December 7, 2015 |
| Eucalyptus 4.2.0 | October 22, 2015 |
| Eucalyptus 4.1.2 | July 29, 2015 |
| Eucalyptus 4.1.1 | May 11, 2015 |
| Eucalyptus 4.1.0 | January 29, 2015 |
| Eucalyptus 4.0.2 | October 20, 2014 |
| Eucalyptus 4.0.1 | August 13, 2014 |
| Eucalyptus 4.0 | May 30, 2014 |
| Eucalyptus 3.4.2 | February 24, 2014 |
| Eucalyptus 3.4 | October 24, 2013 |
| Eucalyptus 3.3 | June 18, 2013 |
| Eucalyptus 3.2 | December 19, 2012 |
| Eucalyptus 3.1 | June 27, 2012 |
| Eucalyptus 3.0 | February 8, 2012 |
| Eucalyptus 2.0 | August, 2010 |