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Right here, silly!

And here!

And here!

HTH!

It's not really "ze cloud" then, right? Fuck, I'm tired of hearing that word.

'Cloud' is a pretty nebulous term. Like it or loath it (the latter being the correct answer), it is definitely sometimes applied to purely internal arrangements, if the internal infrastructure has been sufficiently abstracted in a manner similar to that used by one of the external 'cloud' services.

The trivial case would be an internal Eucalyptus implementation, where the entire point is to be wholly compatible with a public cloud provider, either for code reuse or for expansion options. Where exactly the dividing line between something like this, and 'yeah, sure, the devs probably all have a copy of VMware Workstation. Why?' is a matter for largely fruitless debate.

The summary does not tell me what this thing, apparently popular in Beijing, actually is! You could at least link their website. :)

Anyway, looking at their website, it looks like it's a "cloud operating system", i.e. infrastructure for managing a cluster in a virtualized, "cloud-like" way. Does anyone know how it compares to other such platforms, like Eucalyptus and the confusingly-similar-in-name CloudStack?

I'd suggest taking a look at Eucalyptus, an open-source cloud management system that's compatible with the Amazon EC2 APIs and thus pretty easy to script and automate for production resources and any of the students who want to play with features like on-demand load balancing.

And now there is the on-premises cloud.

You want OpenStack, CloudStack or Eucalyptus. All the flexibility of cloud (dynamically spinning up instances, etc) while running on your own hardware.

[...] what makes a cloud and virtualization different is the provider, cloud is 3rd party: amazon, etc...

Marten Mickos (CEO of MySQL for 7 years) disagrees with you: Keynote at Cloud Expo Europe - Clouds Are All About APIs..

His new product provides in-house cloud services. If you listen you his talk you will understand why in-house clouds are very different from virtualization. You can buy co-hosted virtualized servers. They are different from cloud services. The same distinction exists when these services are provided in-house.

Argh. It should be using a light version of MogileFS or Walrus for storage.

http://danga.com/mogilefs/

http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/EucalyptusStorage_v1.4

You can do something similar with Amazon Web Services and/or Eucalyptus.

Yeah, that was what I was thinking. How is what VMWare now offering different from just deploying an Eucalyptus enterprise cloud? In other words, why is this a "game-changer" as the OP said?

You can do something similar with Amazon Web Services and/or Eucalyptus.

"THIS. Want a private "cloud"? http://forum.eucalyptus.com/"

Does it create for me the OS templates and bootstrapping processes?
Does it provide configuration management and orchestration?
Does it provide an operational control panel?
Does it provide auth and policy definition and enforcement?
Does it provide a system for multi-tenancy and back-charging?
Does it provide for proper hardware matching, deployment and management?
Does it provide monitoring and load evolution?

A private cloud requieres a bit more than just dowloading eucalyptus from its home site.

THIS. Want a private "cloud"? http://forum.eucalyptus.com/

Free. API-compliant with EC2 (and somewhat with S3). Deployable on your own hardware.

The more interesting use case is probably to be found when you combine the existence of this project with the existence of Eucalyptus which somebody mentioned above. The fact that it works with EC2 is interesting; but paying Amazon is likely not cost effective(since demand for desktop seats tends not to fluctuate nearly as fast as some server loads do and is, in any case, constrained by the number of NX capable thin clients available) a service where you pay extra for the elasticity isn't obviously sensible.

WIth Eucalyptus, though, you can fairly easily run your own setup, keeping the bandwidth in house and thus cheap and abundant, easily spawning a desktop instance that is available to a given user across multiple machines, thin or fat, in your organization. Because of Linux's unixy legacy, which tends to make multi-user systems a good bit easier and more natural, this isn't as compelling as it is with Windows setups; but there are still purposes for which it could be nice.

Done and done. http://www.eucalyptus.com/ - it even replicates the Amazon AWS API, and is available on Ubuntu.

The actual ec2 instances are pretty much bog-standard linux VMs. For everything else, there's eucalyptus.

This doesn't mean that EC2 is necessarily a good idea, or that Amazon couldn't slip you a nasty dose of strategic downtime if they, for some reason, felt like it; but their ability to exert lock-in in the medium term is pretty weak.

And the simple truth is that you should be nervous. The cloud has distinct advantages that are being overshadowed by large disadvantages: the 'Next Big Lock-in (tm)'.

Basically this is the same thing 'our' community has been saying for years now: it's all about Open standards, Open document formats and Open API's. In classic style, the blogger either fails to see this point clearly or fails to clearly point this out. Your pick :).

Nicolas Barcet, the Ubuntu Server product manager at Canonical, held a talk at the Open World Forum in Paris last week. He explained how Canonical is putting its support behind Project Eucalyptus because they see an Open implementation of Amazon's API's as the way to force an Open standard for cloud computing. I think they may have a point.

VM's are great for many things. First off, know that most hardware is severely under-utilized. Then factor in the ease of replication, testing, security(via sandboxing and other methods), ability to scale horizontally quickly. There are downsides too of course which is why we prefer to run our own XEN setup, then use http://www.eucalyptus.com/ light up more VM's in case of load need or disaster.

VM are a huge cost saver, and the fastest development environment.

Only it appears that you won't be. See Eucalyptus, which is an open source implementation of the Amazon API. Since Amazon is the 300 lb gorilla currently and it's API appears to be on the way of being the defacto standard, having Eucalyptus around means that other cloud service providers can use the same API and steal some of Amazon's business, and users can switch to another provider as necessary or desired.

There are definitely reasons not to use clouds, but lock-in isn't one of them.

I wonder how many people are willing to pay a 25% premium to run Windows on Amazon EC2?

It may be difficult for any startup, open source or not, to gain a foothold here. But when you're looking to reduce costs as much as possible, to sell a utility computing model, I don't see why you'd be adding extra software costs right away.

In fact, the summary mentions other things, like Puppet and Hadoop, that make an impact.

I don't know that anyone is claiming open source could provide such a service, any more than open source could provide free and open hardware. Even if you have a completely open design, you still probably need some sort of corporate entity to build and sell it.

But at the same time, I don't see why any "cloud" provider in their right mind would pass up things like Puppet or Eucalyptus. Indeed, this is exactly the kind of place where the typical objections to open source hold no water -- merely providing a service is most likely not going to force you to disclose any changes, and that assumes you have to change the project at all.

Folks may be familiar with the open source EC2 "clone" (or whatever) Eucalyptus. The latest version even has Elastic Block Storage support. Is anyone using it in anger?

Folks may be familiar with the open source EC2 "clone" (or whatever) Eucalyptus. The latest version even has Elastic Block Storage support. Is anyone using it in anger?