Eucalyptus 3 Product Roadmap

What is Eucalyptus 3?

Eucalyptus 3 is an on-premise (private) cloud software platform that supports industry-standard APIs and new production-grade capabilities like high availability.

Eucalyptus 3 is our new architectural foundation from which we will produce a series of releases. The first release in this series is version 3.0, Generally Available as of February 8th, 2012. Eucalyptus 3 releases are about advancing reliability and feature richness of the leading on-premise Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) software platform. Our design goals are focused on use cases involving self-service users and scalable applications that require infrastructure resource orchestration and automated provisioning from tools, user portals, and our APIs. The latest platform offers a highly available autonomic IaaS platform to enable scalability, robustness of the applications that provision and run using the de facto standard Amazon AWS compatible APIs.

Read the full overall product capabilities of the platform

Eucalyptus 3.0 Features

• High-Availability (HA) of the Eucalyptus Service(s) - Autonomic hot failover and repair for cloud service (s) components

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) API Plus Extensions for On-premise Clouds

  • Create and manage secure resource access for users, groups and accounts
  • Ability to use enterprise corporate directories AD/LDAP to federate and sync user identity information
  • Ability to exercise complete control over resource access using flexible yet powerful fine grained policies

• Rapid Instancing - Ability for the applications and users to boot instances rapidly using unique cross hypervisor Copy-on-Write functionality

• Elastic Block Storage (EBS) Improvements -

  • Capability to boot instances from Elastic Block Storage
  • New NetApp Storage Area Network adapter to enable self-service on NetApp block storage infrastructure
  • New JBOD block storage adapter to enable elastic self-serviceability of any set of direct attached external storage disk groups

• Expanded Support for Windows Images

  • Support for seven different versions with ephemeral disk capabilities
  • Support for Amazon AWS style authentication to access Windows instances

• Enhanced VMware Support

  • Faster and more robust image preparation and instancing
  • Support for vSphere 4.X
  • Improved scale, more extensive deployment topologies

• Extended Linux Distro Support - CentOS 5, RHEL 5, RHEL 6, Ubuntu Lucid 10.04

• Re-designed Administrative Console - Simple yet flexible administrative controls for Cloud Administrators

• Improved Command-line Administration Tools - Host of new command line options to administer the platform

• Completely Re-designed Packaging, Upgrade and Dependency Management - Drastically reduces deployment and upgrade of the platform

Read the complete list of Eucalyptus 3 features

NEXT Eucalyptus 3 Release

The next release in the Eucalyptus 3 series is an enhancement release that will focus on our effort to further ease the installation, configuration and distribution of the platform in addition to many new important bug fixes.

v3.1 - Q2, 2012

New Functionality

• Open Source Focus - The upcoming release will focus on code packaging so that subscription-only modules are add-on's to Eucalyptus IaaS open source platform. Eucalyptus will then be developed and managed transparently as an open source project, with all new IaaS open source code going directly into public repositories and bugs tracked in a public bug tracker. There is no differentiation between community and subscription versions; no longer will they be developed separately and sequentially as in the past. There are however, subscription only add-on modules that can be deployed on top of the Eucalyptus IaaS platform using separate installation.

• Replacing MySQL with PostgreSQL - Moving from MySQL to PostgreSQL will allow for simplified redistribution of Eucalyptus

• Linux Distro Integration - Debian, Fedora

• Faststart 3 - Faststart is a simplified installer that quickly deploys a default configuration of Eucalytpus 3.1, which can be used as a proof of concept

On-going Engineering

• New or Updated Platforms - Eucalyptus plans to keep up with various latest Linux distributions in every major or minor release for the Cloud services modules as well as all supported IaaS cloud functionality. All the supported platforms are published on a Compatibility Matrix as and when new updates are available. Eucalyptus 3.1 will continue support for RHEL 5 & 6, CentOS 5, and Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) and will add CentOS 6 and Ubuntu Precise (12.04). In addition, we’ll provide Fedora and Debian versions though not available under a support SLA, we’re also working to support VMWare version 5 products.

• Performance and Scale Testing - Eucalyptus 3 has made tremendous inroads into making the platform highly available, scalable and much faster in provisioning resources. As Eucalyptus continues to evolve we will be furthering our work on advanced performance and scalability of the platform.

• AWS Compatibility - Eucalyptus continues to focus on compatibility with the published Amazon AWS API so developers, partners and users of the cloud will be able to use the latest updates in their applications and end user environments.

• High Quality Releases - With nearly 400 combinations of Operating System, Hypervisor, Networking modes, SAN’s, and HA topologies to test, Eucalyptus continues to invest in automated QA. As we move forward and add more features and platforms to support, we’ll continue our investment in automation and also open it up to the community. Our IT department has put a dedicated quality system in place with over 200 dedicated nodes for testing.

• Packaging - Eucalyptus 3 continues to work on ease of installation and now provides package repositories.

New Areas Under Development

Areas Under Development section groups functionality that are currently under development but may or may not be included in the immediate next release. Eucalyptus will make every effort to include features listed here but not every one of them will make the next release. Features that don’t make the next release will automatically move to a follow up later release.

• EuStore - EuStore is a tool to simplify the management of Eucalyptus images. Read more about the project at https://projects.eucalyptus.com/redmine/projects/eustore/wiki.

• VMware v5 (Subscription only) - Platform support will have support for the latest vSphere, ESXi, and vCenter products from VMware.

Future Development Directions

This section lists functionality and platform additions or changes that are currently on the radar and very much in planning stages for release within the next 12 months:

• Eucalyptus Load Balancing - An Amazon AWS compatible Elastic Load Balancing API implementation to automatically distribute application traffic across many virtual cloud instances

• Eucalyptus Cloud Watch - An Amazon compatible Cloud Watch API implementation which allows monitoring of virtual cloud instances. This is especially useful for load balancing, improved fault tolerance and auto scaling.

• Eucalyptus Auto Scaling - An Amazon AWS compatible capability to automatically increase or decrease compute, network and storage capacity based on policies specified.

• Instance Tagging - Capability for the users and applications to add custom tags to virtual cloud instances

• EMC SAN Adapter (Subscription only) - Extending Eucalyptus Block Storage support to EMC’s most popular storage arrays

• Maintenance Mode Instances - Ability for users and applications to easily evacuate instances transparently from a Node Controller to another for variety of reasons including maintenance.

• EuTester - The EuTester suite will help users build detailed test plans, ensuring that growing Eucalyptus installations continue to behave as expected. Read more about the project at https://projects.eucalyptus.com/redmine/projects/eutester.

• Silvereye - Silvereye, based upon Faststart, is a suite of installation tools that will allow installation and configuration of more complex Eucalyptus environments. Read more about the project at https://projects.eucalyptus.com/redmine/projects/silvereye/wiki