Utility computing, elastic computing, and cloud computing are all terms that refer to the concept of dynamically provisioning processing time and storage space from a ubiquitous “cloud” of computational resources. Such systems allow users to acquire and release the resources on demand and provide ready access to data from processing elements, while relegating the physical location and exact parameters of the resources. Over the past few years, such systems have become increasingly popular, but nearly all current cloud computing offerings are either proprietary or depend upon software infrastructure that is invisible to the research community. In this work, we present Eucalyptus, an open-source software implementation of cloud computing that utilizes compute resources that are typically available to researchers, such as clusters and workstation farms. In order to foster community research exploration of cloud computing systems, the design of Eucalyptus emphasizes modularity, allowing researchers to experiment with their own security, scalability, scheduling, and interface implementations. In this paper, we outline the design of Eucalyptus, describe our own implementations of the modular system components, and provide results from experiments that measure performance and scalability of an Eucalyptus installation currently deployed for public use.
The main contribution of our work is the presentation of the first research-oriented open-source cloud computing system focused on enabling methodical investigations into the programming, administration, and deployment of systems exploring this nove distributed computing model.