When Eucalyptus Systems was a newly established company, its chief technology officer, Rich Wolski, set out the thinking behind its first commercial product: an open source private cloud platform that supported Amazon Web Services APIs and worked with VMware. Wolski was also a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he had led the research group that produced the original software.
That product, the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition, is the one readers were pointed to when they followed links about converting Amazon EC2 images. A French cloud-strategy write-up from OCTO described a conversion tool for EC2 images as something Eucalyptus supplied in its commercial version, rather than in the free software.
From university project to company
Eucalyptus was developed at UCSB in 2007. It let enterprises build large on-premise clouds, as well as hybrid clouds that used both private and public resources. It ran on Linux and was presented as fully compatible with the Amazon Web Services cloud, and as the only cloud architecture supporting the same APIs.
Wolski’s explanation for commercialising was practical. Businesses and data-centre operators had begun contacting the team, wanting to use Eucalyptus or asking for help running it. A public university could not provide that kind of service, he argued, because of conflicts of interest and intellectual property constraints. He said the business side of the user community had grown since the company was set up.
In a separate interview with InternetNews.com around the company’s launch, Wolski described the early plan as support and consulting for the open source project, with commercial products to follow. He said the aim was to build on the uptake the project had already shown.
What the Enterprise Edition added
The Enterprise Edition took the platform a step further by letting companies build private clouds on VMware virtualisation. It supported vSphere, ESXi and ESX, alongside the open source hypervisors Xen and KVM that the community version already used. For enterprises that had standardised on VMware, that meant a private cloud could be built without moving off their existing hypervisor.
The same interview also touched on the product’s roadmap. Wolski said the management interface in the open source release was fairly basic, and that expanding management capability was a key focus. He also said reporting was basic and would be improved. On the open source releases, he said version 1.5 was due soon and would extend Amazon S3 compatibility and tidy internal code related to EC2, with a 1.6 expected to finish the remaining API corners and improve installation and management.
Where Eucalyptus went next
The company’s co-founders were Wolski as CTO, Dan Nurmi, Neil Soman, Dmitrii Zagorodnov, Chris Grzegorczyk, Graziano Obertelli and Woody Rollins as CEO. Eucalyptus software was included in the Ubuntu 9.04 distribution in 2009.
In March 2012, Eucalyptus Systems announced a formal agreement with Amazon Web Services. Hewlett-Packard acquired Eucalyptus in September 2014. HP’s public cloud offering, HPE Helion, was shut down by the end of 2016. The Eucalyptus team was moved into the HPE Enterprise Services division, which merged with Computer Sciences Corporation to form DXC Technology on 1 April 2017.
Wolski later returned to full-time teaching. His UCSB profile describes him as the progenitor of the Eucalyptus open source cloud project. In a later interview with OStatic he said he was not surprised by the rise of open source cloud adoption, calling it a natural next step. He added that security was a challenge but that he did not think cloud security was worse than on other platforms.