How Eucalyptus Enables EC2 Compatibility with Nebula
Posted on Nov. 4, 2009 by Jlindsay
Tags: iaas infrastructure technology tools

As I'm sure you've heard by now, Nebula's Infrastructure-as-a-Service layer is powered in major part by Eucalyptus, an open-source software system for managing cloud systems that came out of UC Santa Barbara. The key selling point of Eucalyptus is that it provides API compatibility with Amazon's EC2 web service. This means that creating and managing virtual machines in Nebula will be as easy as using Amazon EC2.

Now, some might argue EC2 is not that easy to use, but I beg to differ. Amazon's strategy when releasing EC2 was making it an API-driven web service. This means that while it was released with a preset suite of command-line tools, those tools are built using a common, public programming interface that anybody can use to create customized tools to control EC2. Amazon bet on the community ecosystem to build great tools for EC2, and it paid off! There are now a wide variety of ways to control EC2, from command-line tools, to web-based tools, to browser extensions. You could even build an interface that lets you create virtual machines from your telephone!

By adopting Eucalyptus, we've bootstrapped the Nebula ecosystem with tools and systems that were made for EC2 and will make many available for you to use with Nebula. Since many of the tools were not made to work with a non-Amazon cloud, they still need minor changes to work with Nebula. However, this gives us a chance to pick the best tools out there, make them Nebula-compatible, and hand those directly to our users. Yay open-source!

One of our favorite tools for quick experimentation is called Sumo, an open-source command-line tool that lets you easily create instances that self-configure and then automatically signs you into the machine. This eliminates several steps and configuration options you would normally have to do by hand, making using cloud infrastructure as easy as typing "sumo launch." This is a great example of the kind of tools we hope to make available to our users, thanks to Eucalyptus EC2 compatibility and open-source.