As if we think about hosting, especially when it comes to heavy duty and demanding scale systems, there are just a handful of options. One of the solutions, alternative conventional clusters or simply multi-server solutions, is the use of Elastic Clouds – in essence, virtual cloud computing, which is executed on a distributed cluster, and provides the resources inside the processor and storage, as well as input / output, while Scaling your system that can be virtually unlimited and silent. This is the meaning of the word in the definition of Elastic – we can flexibly scale the system based on our needs at any time, it does not depend on the specific hardware or other resources.

On the hosting market, cloud hosting is now the major player. In India there are already several reviews, introductions to the topic, so I’ll just give link to the Advantages Of Cloud Computing. It provides full virtualization to perform custom tasks, so you are deploying in the cloud . This approach is very flexible and does not restrict users to apply a set of applications and libraries, allowing them to focus on what to do and not to fight with the restrictions.

However. Do you think Amazon just eat? No, it turned out that the decision allow themselves to deploy for not only to the level of virtualization, but also to build their own fully open Elastic Cloud platform.

The project is Elastic Cloud platform – Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Link Your Programs To Useful Systems that provides an open platform implementation of the clouds, which, incidentally, is compatible with the format of the images for Amazon EC2.

Technologically it runs on top of the cluster that is running on Rock Cluster (it is required to install the system in future and it will not require additional tools), and demands for the deployment of virtualization platforms Xen 3.0.2. Now the system is distributed in the form of two images for deployment via the Rock on all cluster nodes (I wonder whether it is possible to deploy the system on a single physical server, for example, two virtual machines, VirtualBox, for testing).

To manage our cloud with available web-based interface in which we can grant permissions to other users and will place their virtual machines for execution in the clouds. Incidentally, we mentioned that the images are compatible with those used in the Amazon-e, and to create them by using the same tools, and such a move seems most reasonable.

EUCALYPTUS say two things, they save money and their time to create their own image format and support it, save you time, they do not need to create different images of the same, and immediately got all the infrastructure for creating images that Amazon had prepared for himself. And to test such solution, it is now much easier, though, of course, at this stage not all functionality is supported.

While the source code of the project are unavailable, although it is fully opened (under the BSD-license) and is declared as open source. In particular, the documentation says that the deployment of such system from source code is now very complex and “wrong” thing.

Despite the youth of the project, the entire functional system already represents and research interest, and even a commercial – it is realistic to deploy on a small cluster and provide cloud hosting services for test projects, such as in the process of developing test systems that are in production then will be deployed on services.