With Amazon becoming a more dominant provider of cloud computing services, it’s only a matter of time before most IT organizations wind up managing an application workload running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The question is to what degree will they want to adjust their on-premise IT operations to accommodate that new reality?
The folks at Eucalyptus Systems are betting the influence Amazon will have on enterprise IT will be profound. As a provider of a management framework for cloud computing that is based on the same technology that Amazon uses, Eucalyptus is making a case for much closer alignment between on-premise IT operations that are managed as private clouds and the public services offered by Amazon.
To that end, Eucalyptus today released version 3.2 of its namesake software that adds support for a new Web-based management console and enhanced reporting tools that make it easier to identify who consumed what set of IT resources. In addition, the new release adds support for EMC VNX SAN Storage and the use of Elastic Block Store storage software on top of raw block devices or JBODS, otherwise known as “just a bunch of disks.”
According to Brady Murray, vice president of alliances for Eucalyptus, the goal with this update is to increase the fidelity between AWS and private clouds running Eucalyptus software. While many organizations today develop applications on top of AWS, Murray says just as many organizations are now thinking in terms of being able to more easily move application workloads running on private clouds to take advantage of comparatively inexpensive public cloud computing resources available on AWS. To make those transitions as simple as possible, Murray says it’s important that the private cloud environment resemble AWS as closely as possible.
At the moment, AWS is essentially a proprietary cloud platform. As of yet, Amazon has not seen fit to embrace emerging cloud management standards such as OpenStack. Whether that’s because Amazon sees OpenStack as an effort by its competition to use standards to try and mitigate Amazon dominance of the cloud or it simply doesn’t see enough customer interest in it is debatable. What is for certain is that with each additional server and storage system that gets added to the Amazon cloud, the gap between Amazon and its competitors continues to widen.
