Eucalyptus has made no secret that it wants to be the private cloud that best complements Amazon’s public cloud. Now, it’s banking that its support of popular Netflix open-source tools will show that it’s the most Amazon Web Services-compatible private cloud of them all.
By supporting these tools that help deploy, run and monitor workloads on AWS, Eucalyptus is going a step beyond supporting the bare-bones AWS APIs, Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos said in a recent interview.
The new Eucalyptus 3.3 release, due in May, will support Chaos Monkey for testing the limits of a cloud deployment under stress; Asgard for automating deployment of large-scale applications; and Edda, a dynamic querying tool, for polling AWS resources.
“For Eucalyptus customers, this is real proof of AWS compatibility. Other folks who say they are AWS-compatible really aren’t — the real proof of the pudding is in supporting these Netflix tools,” he said. ”We’re not saying that everyone in the world will start using Asgard, although many will.”
That Eucalyptus would throw its lot in with Netflix is not shocking. Mickos and members of the Eucalyptus team attended the Netflix OSS open house in February. Netflix used that event to promote the use of its open-sourced cloud management, testing and monitoring tools by third parties, at least partly so that cloud alternatives to AWS will emerge.
Netflix is one of the biggest and most skillful AWS customers. Netflix tools fill gaps in AWS and help it run better. But Netflix is also acutely aware that Amazon has a streaming video service that is a direct competitor to its own core business and would very much like there to be another cloud out there that is as scalable and price efficient as AWS.
In the open-source cloud world, Eucalyptus contends with a slew of OpenStack players as well as OpenNebula and CloudStack. But there is concern that the market, as young and potentially big as it may be, will not support all these options. Talk at the recent OpenStack summit and beyond is that there will be consolidation of the contending vendors.
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