Marten Mickos is working on a joke. He has the opening line — “An ops guy, a VMware guy, and a cloud guy walk into a bar…” — but he hasn’t figured out what the punchline is, yet. Mickos is the former CEO of MySQL AB. Today he’s the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, developers of private infrastructure as a service solutions, and he thinks about “The Cloud” a lot.
Eucalyptus Systems is releasing version 3.1 of their infrastructure as a service (IaaS) product today, with a number of new features, improved installation options, and a renewed commitment to open source. According to Mickos, the cloud itself should be the product. It should be wholly integrated with existing technologies, and as easily upgraded as any other product. It is, in short, a whole new way of thinking about computing.
There is no shortage of IaaS solutions available today. Each of them is trying to do basically two things: 1) attract your attention, and 2) be fully compatible with Amazon Web Services. Eucalyptus has a leg up on the competition for item 2 with Amazon’s recent blessing of their product as the IaaS to use when you want a private cloud.
This partnership has yielded two specific things for Eucalyptus, according to Mickos: Amazon reviews Eucalyptus’s work to ensure API compatibility (a benefit not available to any other IaaS product), and Amazon and Eucalyptus approach customers together to sell “The Cloud”. For those customers that need public and private cloud solutions, this tag team approach is a huge win. And for everyone else, it secures in their minds that Eucalyptus is the product to choose whenever they do decide to implement a private cloud.
