cloud

How to Build a Private Cloud

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) is a private cloud that embeds Eucalyptus cloud on Ubuntu server. The current release of UEC runs on Ubuntu 9.04 Server running Eucalyptus 1.5. There is a latter version of Eucalyptus (i.e., 1.5.2); however, I didn’t try that for this blog post. In this blog example I installed all of the UEC cloud components on a single system. Typically you would not want to do this; however, this works well as a demo system.

Quick UEC Overview

UEC is made up of three components: Cloud Controller (eucalyptus-cloud), Cluster Controller (eucalyptus-cc), and one or more Node Controllers (eucalyptus-nc). The Cloud Controller is the Web-services interface and the WEBUI server. The Cloud Controller also provides resource scheduling and S3 and EBS computable storage interfaces. A cluster in UEC is synonymous with an availability zone in AWS. In this release of UEC the Cluster Controller has to run on the same machine as the Cloud Controller. The Cluster Controller provides network control for the defined cluster and manages resources within the cluster (i.e., resources on the node). The Cloud Controller and the Cluster Controller are sometimes referred to as the Front End. Typically the Node Controller runs on a separate box from the Front End box. In a production environment there will be multiple Node Controllers making up a larger cluster (i.e., your cloud). Each Node Controller runs as a KVM hypervisor and all the Node Controllers in the cluster make up the cloud environment. In the current release, running multiple clusters is really not supported. In future releases of UEC, you will be able to run multiple clusters in one environment. Each cluster acts like an availability zone in the UEC environment. As I noted earlier, in this blog example, I am putting everything on the same box (my laptop). I will point out areas where the configuration would be different in a normal installation of UEC.

Building a Private Cloud in One Hour

EUCALYPTUS sprouts business shoots

In what is surely a contender for the most-complicated backronym of the ages, the Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems, first developed at Middleware and Applications Yielding Heterogenous Environments for Metacomputing, UC- Santa Barbara (MAYHEM in case you weren’t seeing the silly nomenclature trend) has jumped the public lagoon for the open waters of commerce:

Eucalyptus Systems, formed out of the team that developed EUCALYPTUS has gone commercial to sell help with their open-source software to cloud-minded types.

EUCALYPTUS (fingers…getting…so… tired) is a set of open-source software tools that allow users to interact with and deploy AWS-type clouds. You can use the software to administer your EC2 images or create your own private data cloud along the same model. Pretty neat, and free, but what happens when AWS decides to re-tool their APIs? Questions soon to be answered.

read the press release here.

watch this page for updates.