Say you want a private cloud, but you also want to be able to expand out into the public cloud when you must? What can you do? One answer is use Eucalyptus 3.3, which can work hand in glove with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Eucalyptus is an open-source program for building AWS-compatible private and hybrid infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds. It pools together existing virtualized infrastructure to create cloud resources for computers, network, and storage. The program also works with AWS, thanks to its support of AWS application programming interfaces (APIs) for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and other AWS services.

The project and its backing company, Eucalyptus Systems, don't just use the AWS APIs. Eucalyptus and AWS have an agreement to facilitate moving cloud workloads from Eucalyptus-based environments in and out of Amazon's AWS.

Eucalyptus 3.3 brings to the table the following new features:

Auto Scaling allows application developers to scale Eucalyptus resources up or down based on policies defined using Amazon EC2-compatible APIs and tools. With Auto Scaling, cloud resources can be seamlessly increased or decreased to maintain performance and meet SLAs [Service Level Agreements]. Elastic Load Balancing is an AWS-compatible service that distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Eucalyptus instances to provide greater fault tolerance for applications. CloudWatch is an AWS-compatible service that monitors cloud resources and applications running on Eucalyptus clouds. It provides a reliable and flexible monitoring solution, which allows application developers and cloud administrators to programmatically collect metrics, set alarms, identify trends, and take action to ensure applications run smoothly.

In addition, the latest version of Eucalyptus includes resource tagging. This enables developers and cloud administrators to assign customizable metadata to Eucalyptus resources. Users, in turn, can use these to categorize cloud resources. For example, you tag cloud resources by purpose, owner, or environment. Developers and administrators can then filter by these tags to manage and monitor specific resource collections.

Eucalyptus also now supports an expanded set of instance types that more closely align with Amazon EC2 instance types.

Want to check it out for yourself before buying into the service? You can try the commercial version of Eucalyptus for free on your own systems with Eucalyptus' FastStart automated installer. Since it's open-source software, you can also download the code and work with the Eucalyptus Community Cloud and rely on community support.

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