Great Scott! An aquaintance of mine just forwarded this to me today and my jaw dropped. A team working out of University of California, Santa Barbara led by Rich Wolski has reverse engineered the EC2 framework and (apparently) released it under a FreeBSD style license.
They gave a demo at the Open Source Grid and Cluster Conference, which was a paid conference (tsk tsk tsk)
From the website:
Overall, the goal of the EUCALYPTUS project is to foster community research and development of Elastic/Utility/Cloud service implementation technologies, resource allocation strategies, service level agreement (SLA) mechanisms and policies, and usage models. The current release is version 1.0 and it includes the following features:
- Interface compatibility with EC2
- Simple installation and deployment using Rocks cluster-management tools
- Simple set of extensible cloud allocation policies
- Overlay functionality requiring no modification to the target Linux environment
- Basic “Cloud Administrator” tools for system management and user accounting
- The ability to configure multiple clusters, each with private internal network addresses, into a single Cloud.
The initial version of EUCALYPTUS requires Xen to be installed on all nodes that can be allocated, but no modifications to the “dom0″ installation or to the hypervisor itself.
This is fantastic and *exactly* what the industry needs right now. In fact, it falls in line nicely with what we’re working on at LayerBoom. I’m extremely interested to see how this works. I’m actually booting it up as I type this.