In this second post on the Open Source and Cloud Computing Series, I am going to take a look at two open source products that will be showcased in Under The Radar Cloud Computing Event at Mountain View on April 24th 2009. Cloud Avenue is a media partner for this event and we have a VIP reader discount code for our readers. Please follow this link to get the discount.

I have talked several times about the importance of Open Source in Cloud Computing. It is no wonder that the Under the Radar event on Cloud Computing has two companies showcasing their product(s)/project on stage. This, clearly, highlights the growing importance of Open Source and how it is shaping the field. In this post, I will talk briefly about these two companies and reserve a longer analysis about them for future posts in this series.

Of the two companies, one of them, Eucalyptus Project, is not a commercial company per se but an academic project gaining tremendous momentum among the business users. The other company, Abiquo, is planning to release their products on 15th April. Like Eucalyptus, Abiquo also has tremendous potential to help enterprise customers take advantage of Cloud architecture.

EUCALYPTUS, short form for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems, is a software that helps implement elasticity, a major requirement for the term Cloud Computing, in clusters or server farms. It is an Open Source project developed by MAYHEM Lab within the Computer Science Department at University of California at Santa Barbara and licensed under FreeBSD style license so that it can be used under commercial environment without any usage restrictions. It is developed using commonly available Linux tools and basic web services technology. It is designed to support multiple client side interface but, right now, it is compatible only with Amazon EC2. Future releases will support other clients too. The source code and binary can be downloaded from their website. They also offer Eucalyptus public cloud for users to test drive. It is free to sign up. Users can run up to 4 virtual machine instances at any point of time and each instance will be automatically be killed after 6 hours. So, this public cloud cannot be used in a production environment.

Abiquo is a Barcelona based company whose technology helps users create, manage and scale complex computing architectures from one unique platform. They have three products, abiCloud, abiNtense and abiData, which can be used to develop infrastructure for public or private or hybrid cloud, hosting solutions, cloud appliances, etc.. abiCloud is the open source cloud manager and it is used to create and manage resources and also scale as per the need. abiNtense is a grid like architecture developed to help reduce the execution time for intense calculations. I can right away see a major role for this product from academic research environments to wall street firms. This will greatly help companies take their products to market fast. abiData, developed using Hadoop, hBase and Pig, is an information management system that can be used to analyze large volumes of data.

It is pretty exciting to see these Open Source companies Under the Radar. If you are also curious about learning more about these Open Source companies and many others in the Cloud infrastructure space, head over to this link and grad a Cloud Avenue VIP reader discount and head over to Microsoft Campus in Mountain View on 24th April.