With the launch of its 3.3 release, Eucalyptus has made quite a progress toward its goal to be the private cloud that provides the highest level of compatibility with Amazon Web Services. Eucalyptus is adding new services to enable its clients to build private clouds compatible with AWS, including Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing and CloudWatch. The company has also included Netflix developer tools like Chaos Monkey, Asgard and Edda in the 3.3 release of it software. Netflix is one of the largest AWS customers and it has developed these tools for use in Amazon’s public cloud. Eucalyptus’ customers will now be able to use these tools in their own private cloud environments.
Eucalyptus provides a standardized and consistent environment across private and public clouds which can help streamline app development and testing. It enables dev teams to test their applications built for AWS on their internal private clouds so they can be more easily moved into production on Amazon’s cloud. With the addition of new scalable web application features, Eucalyptus 3.3 may be an ideal platform for developing, testing and deploying cloud apps.
The first of the three new features of Eucalyptus 3.3 is auto-scaling, which can automatically add virtual machines when the workload increases and release them when the workload subsides. Additionally, Eucalyptus customers are now able to scale workloads automatically to AWS. The second new feature is elastic load balancing, an AWS-compatible service that distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Eucalyptus instances to provide greater fault tolerance for apps. Last of the newly introduced features is CloudWatch, a service that monitors cloud resources and applications running on Eucalyptus clouds. It enables developers to programmatically collect metrics, set alarms, identify trends, and take action to ensure applications run smoothly. Eucalyptus 3.3 also comes with a maintenance mode that allows cloud administrators to perform maintenance on their private cloud without any downtime to applications running on the cloud.
Eucalyptus’ main competitors are OpenStack based products, such as Citrix’s CloudStack. The company says that even though there is a lot of interest in the industry for OpenStack, Eucalyptus stands out from the competition due to AWS compatibility. Eucalyptus customers include MemSQL, AppDynamics, and Nokia Siemens Networks who are using Eucalyptus private clouds for testing of their applications built for AWS. Eucalyptus 3.3 will be available in June 2013.