AGENDA

The Eucalyptus Open-source Cloud Computing System

Daniel Nurmi, Rich Wolski, Chris Grzegorczyk, Graziano Obertelli, Sunil Soman, Lamia Youseff, Dmitrii Zagorodnov

Abstract: Cloud computing systems fundamentally provide access to large amounts of data and computational resources through a variety of interfaces. Many extant systems have in common the notion that resources can be acquired and released on-demand and that the user interface be kept fairly simple. In addition, resources provided by cloud computing systems hide a great deal of information from the user through virtualization (physical location of the resource, precise architectural details of the compute resources). These types of systems offer a new programming target for scalable application developers and have gained popularity over the past few years. However, most cloud computing systems in operation today are proprietary, rely upon infrastructure that is invisible to the research community, or are not explicitly designed to be instrumented and modified by systems researchers interested in cloud computing systems.

In this work, we present Eucalyptus -- an open-source software framework for cloud computing that implements what is commonly referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); systems that give users the ability to run and control entire virtual machine instances deployed across a variety physical resources. We outline the basic principles of the Eucalyptus design, and discuss architectural trade-offs that we have made in order to allow Eucalyptus to be portable, modular and simple to use on infrastructure commonly found within academic settings.