eucalyptus

Learning from physics research to tackle big data

Companies are increasingly collecting amounts of digital information that are so large as to be unwieldy. It's no surprise that finding a way to securely store, categorize and recall this information efficiently is a huge advantage for any enterprise or organization.

The growth of information has introduced an entirely new category of software in the big-data arena, which includes a variety of databases, processing engines, and applications. The main objective of all of these tools is to make data more malleable and consumable so that it can be used in an easier way.

This week, CERN, the European Organization … Read more

Can PostgreSQL pickup where MySQL left off?

EnterpriseDB, a provider of enterprise-class products and services based on PostgreSQL, today announced Postgres Plus Cloud Server, which the company has billed as "a full-featured, Oracle-compatible, enterprise-class PostgreSQL database-as-a-service for public and private clouds with support for Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus, Rackspace, and GoGrid."

We've seen other database-as-a-service offerings come on the scene from the likes of Salesforce.com's Database.com, Amazon RDS, as well as from startup Xeround. But they're not based on PostgreSQL, which has had years of hardening and development by a committed community. The other databases are not "Oracle compatible," … Read more

Private-cloud growing pains

As cloud adoption continues to soar, the debate between public and private continues apace. While I am a fervent believer in the public cloud, I do believe there is a lot of opportunity for private clouds in many areas, especially industries that have strong technology footprints and experience with large data center management, such as financial services and government.

Over the weekend I read a piece by Jonathan Feldman that really showed how challenging private cloud solutions can be. Lots of dependencies on non-mainstream software packages coupled with a lack of cloud-specific skills shows the lack of maturity in the … Read more

When will cloud computing start raining cash?

Open-source cloud vendor Eucalyptus is rumored to be raising venture money at a $100 million valuation. Meanwhile, an Under The Radar conference dubbed "Commercializing the Cloud" is set for mid-April at which a host of new start-ups will talk about how they're set to shake the clouds free of billions of dollars in sales.

It can't come soon enough. For all the talk about cloud computing, the business of cloud computing is still in its infancy.

When will it grow up?

There's no shortage of exceptionally cool cloud technology. The most recent company to get … Read more

Commercial open source had very good 2009

2009 was very good for open-source businesses. Sure, there was the very public news of Red Hat's gravity-defying year, along with Novell's SUSE Linux business climbing each quarter, but what of the still-private open-source companies?

It turns out they had much to celebrate, too.

Not every open-source company publicized its progress, but several did:

SugarCRM announced a "record year in terms of revenue, subscriptions and users, adding over 2,000 commercial customers" to bring its total customer base to over 6,000 organizations scattered across 75 different countries. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to the company.) … Read more

Reports: Tech recovery driven by developing nations, cloud

Analysts may differ on the strength of the technology spending recovery, but they're increasingly in sync on believing that 2010 will see a healthy rise.

Both Forrester Research and Goldman Sachs recently updated their projections on technology spending in 2010, and both see global spending on the upswing: Forrester projects 8.1 percent growth while Goldman Sachs's new "Mapping 2010: Key Tech Trends to Watch" report forecasts a more conservative 5 percent growth.

It's fair to say, however, that technology vendors will be happy with either outcome, especially as the U.S. continues to shed jobs.… Read more

Eucalyptus open-sources the cloud (Q&A)

It's reasonably clear that open source is the heart of cloud computing, with open-source components adding up to equal cloud services like Amazon Web Services. What's not yet clear is how much the cloud will wear that open source on its sleeve, as it were.

Eucalyptus, an open-source platform that implements "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS) style cloud computing, aims to take open source front and center in the cloud-computing craze. The project, founded by academics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is now a Benchmark-funded company with an ambitious goal: become the universal cloud platform that everyone from Amazon to Microsoft to Red Hat to VMware ties into.

Or, rather, that customers stitch together their various cloud assets within Eucalyptus.

I caught up with Eucalyptus founder and Chief Technology Officer Rich Wolski to learn more about how Eucalyptus hopes to displace industry leaders like VMware, and the role that open source plays in growing the cloud-computing market.

While Wolski made a big deal about the company's open-source credentials, I found his argument about the open architecture of Eucalyptus more compelling:

[Eucalyptus] is architected to be compatible with such a wide variety of commonly installed data center technologies, [and hence] provides an easy and low-risk way of building private (i.e. on-premise or internal) clouds...

Thus data center operators choosing Eucalyptus are assured of compatibility with the emerging application development and operational cloud ecosystem while attaining the security and IT investment amortization levels they desire without the "fear" of being locked into a single public cloud platform.… Read more

Open-source freeloaders, inventions and replacements

Over the last several months I've changed my opinions on open source any number of times. I like to think I'm not just being fickle and instead it's market dynamics that are shifting focus and opinion.

I was recently quoted in an article about open-source "leeches", and in many situations I stand behind the comments. As it turns out, one of the companies I mentioned is now paying, though many others are still not. Freeloaders will always be part of the open-source game, and I think we all accept that, even if it gets under your skin occasionally. At this point, I don't really care--I'd rather see more unpaid open source than expensive proprietary software in use.

In the past I've had bewildering conversations with CIOs and VPs where they told me that they wouldn't contribute code back because they had "created IP--why would we give it to you for free?" while generating hundreds of millions of dollars on top of open-source software that someone, somewhere had given to them for free. I guess that's the sticking point. Not the freeloading, but the assumption that what they created is somehow more valuable than the product that they built on top of.

This brings up a whole world of issues for those trying to build open source companies. Lately, I'm becoming less convinced that you can build a pure-play open source company if you don't fall into two broad categories: direct replacements or inventions. … Read more

Apple rejects iPhone app over access to Kama Sutra

Apple's iPhone app rejection policy continues to mystify.

This time, Apple has rejected Eucalyptus, an e-book reader app that can--after purposely searching for it--access the Kama Sutra. Like it does with all books available through the app, Eucalyptus downloads a text-only version of the ancient Indian book on sexuality from Project Gutenberg.

In a letter to the developer on Thursday, Apple rejected the app because it deems the content available on Eucalyptus as "objectionable."

What's interesting about this case is that the Kama Sutra is available in the iPhone App Store through several other methods. For … Read more