Eucalyptus è

an open-source system for implementing on-premise private and hybrid clouds using the hardware and software infrastructure that is in place, without modification.

Eucalyptus adds capabilities such as end-user customization, self-service provisioning, and legacy application support to data center virtualization features, making IT customer service easier, more fully featured, and less expensive.

Ecco come risponde alla domanda in epigrafe in occasione del meetup di Sylicon Valley sul Cloud Computing   Rich Wolski, professore di Computer Science all’Unifersità della California, esperto in GRID e Cloud Computing  e che col suo gruppo di esperti e qualificati informatici, ha implementato il progetto Eucalyptus per esperire il real cloud, le API di Amazon

The short answer is no.

The primary purpose for Eucalyptus is research. It was never meant to be our little untethered private Amazon cloud. But if it works, why not?

Eucalyptus is Not a Full Implementation of the Amazon Stack

Eucalyptus implements most of EC2 and a little of S3. They hope to get community support for the rest. That of course makes Eucalyptus far less interesting as a development platform. But if your use for Eucalyptus is as an instant provisioning framework you are still in the game. Their emulation of EC2 is so good RightScale was able to operate on top of Eucalyptus. Impressive.

But even in the EC2 arena I have to wonder for how long they’ll track Amazon development. If you are a researcher implementing every new Amazon feature is going to get mighty old after a while. It will be time to move on and if you are dependent on Eucalyptus you are in trouble. Sure, you can move to Amazon but what about that $1 million data center buildout?

Developing software not tied to the Amazon service stack then Eucalyptus would work great.

As an Amazon developer I would want my code to work without too much trouble in both environments. Certainly you can mock the different services for testing or create a service layer to hide different implementations, but that’s not ideal and makes Eucalyptus as an Amazon proxy less attractive.

One of the uses for Eucalyptus is to make Amazon cheaper and easier by testing code locally without out having to deploy into Amazon all the time. Given the size of images the bandwidth and storage costs add up after a while, so this could make Eucalyptus a valuable part of the development process.

Eucalyptus is Not as Scalable as Amazon

No kidding. Amazon has an army of sysadmins, network engineers, and programmers to make their system work at such ginormous scales. Eucalyptus was built on smarts, grit and pizza. It will never scale as well as Amazon, but Eucalyptus is scalable to 256 nodes right now. Which is not bad.

One big limit Eucalyptus has is the self-imposed requirement to work well in any environment. It’s just a tarball you can install on top of any network. They rightly felt this was necessary for adoption. Saying to potential customers that you need to setup a special network before you can test this software tends to slow down adoption. By making Eucalyptus work as an overlay they soothed a lot of early adopter pain.

But by giving up control of the machines, the OS, the disk, and the network they limited how scalable they can be. There’s more to scalability than just software. Amazon has total control and that gives them power. Eucalyptus plans to make more invasive and more scalable options available in the future.

A voi la scelta.