Image via CrunchBase
Ever since OpenStack (previous CloudAve coverage) was launched during last year’s OSCON, they are garnering too much buzz in the tech media. When Canonical announced last week that they will be using OpenStack as the foundational technology in Ubuntu, there was considerable buzz in the tech blogosphere about how it will affect Eucalyptus (previous CloudAve coverage) in the long run. Similarly, when Eucalyptus announced their closer collaboration with RedHat last year, there were expectations about Eucalyptus piggybacking RedHat deep into the enterprises. In fact, I was even jokingly speculating that RedHat will soon buy Eucalyptus. However, with RedHat announcing their IaaS and PaaS offerings recently, there were again questions about the future of Eucalyptus. The pressure is clearly on them to take the buzz away from OpenStack.
When I had a chance to talk to Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus, few months back, I asked him about the relative quietness of Eucalyptus ever since OpenStack was released. He told me that they were busy getting their platform to mature and they are planning to focus on putting Eucalyptus in more places this year. In the early January, they announced the opening of an office in Beijing, China with plans to focus on Asian markets, a segment where Cloud.com has already established their presence and Enomaly is making tall claims. During the recent OpenStack summit, I also heard a lot about the levels of interest they are getting in the Asian markets. With every player showing considerable interest in the Asian markets, Eucalyptus’ move was a logical one.
Recently, Marten also wrote a blog post highlighting 25000 implementations of Eucalyptus platform (both free and paid) listing out some of the organizations using Eucalyptus platform.
Because our software is open source, anybody can download it, install it, use it, modify it and re-distribute it. In fact, we have recorded across 162 countries and independent territories the starting-up of over 25,000 Eucalyptus clouds. The list includes nearly one thousand universities and colleges. At least 21 of the Fortune 100 companies started a Eucalyptus cloud in 2010.
The list of Eucalyptus users is as varied as the use cases for cloud infrastructure-as-a-service: Aerospace Corporation, Boeing, Cloudera, DELL, the European Space Agency, InterContinental Hotels Group, Linden Lab, Portico Systems, Puma, Siemens, Trend Micro, USASpending.gov, US Department of Agriculture, US Department of Science & Technology, Walgreens, Wetpaint.com, among others.
They have followed up this post today with an announcement that Plinga, one of the largest European social gaming provider, has selected Eucalyptus as their on premise cloud platform. Plinga currently hosts more than 30 social games across 20 social networks and game portals in Europe, including six of the top 20 most popular games in Germany and five of the top 10 games in Poland. Eucalyptus provides Plinga with a dynamically scalable, highly available, elastic and agile software for managing its rapidly growing social games using secure, on-premise IT compute and storage resources.
Similar to Zynga, one of the largest social gaming provider in US, Plinga used Amazon EC2 before investing on their own cloud using Eucalyptus. The Social gaming sites where the unpredictability in the beginning paves way for a more predictable behavior are excellent candidates for a move from public clouds to private clouds. Plinga is following the same path and a move from AWS EC2 to Eucalyptus is much easier because Eucalyptus supports EC2 API.
With some sound bites coming from Interop that linked Zynga to another cloud platform provider, it became imperative for Eucalyptus to generate some buzz showcasing their customers. This Plinga story is a good fit (well, Plinga cannot match the user base of Zynga but still a comparable use case) for Eucalyptus as they fight for the mindshare with OpenStack and other cloud platforms.
Related articles
- Canonical Embraces OpenStack in the Cloud, But Eucalyptus Still in the Mix (ostatic.com)
- Ubuntu switches cloud software (infoworld.com)
- Ubuntu eats OpenStack for clouds (go.theregister.com)
- Ubuntu Switches To OpenStack For Cloud (it.slashdot.org)
- Canonical switches to OpenStack for Ubuntu Linux cloud (zdnet.com)
Despite Eucalyptus having more installs (maybe?), and being compatible with EC2 APIs – I will be checking out Openstack. Buzz from real industry leaders and know-it-alls carries a lot of weight.