What is Eucalyptus?
Eucalyptus is an open-source cloud computing software platform that allows users to deploy private and hybrid clouds that are compatible with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Developed as a research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Eucalyptus enables companies to build AWS-compatible infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds on their own data centers and internal servers.
The key benefit of Eucalyptus is providing the flexibility of the public cloud within a private on-premises environment. It offers AWS-compatible services such as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for compute capacity, Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) for load balancing, and an identity and access management (IAM) service. This allows seamless compatibility with AWS along with the control, security, and cost savings of an on-premises deployment.
Eucalyptus is commonly used for hybrid cloud deployments, allowing workloads to burst into the public AWS cloud when on-premises resources are insufficient to meet demands. The platform handles network transfers and data migration between public and private environments. Eucalyptus offers high scalability and is designed for enterprise use cases.