Eucalyptus is a software platform for implementing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in a private cluster computing environment. The name is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems, a term that serves as a concise definition .
Eucalyptus features include:
- Supports both Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs).
- Application program interface- (API) compatible with Amazon EC2 platform.
- Compatible with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Simple Storage Service (S3).
- Works with multiple hypervisors including VMware, Xen and KVM.
- Can be installed and deployed from source code or DEB and RPM packages.
- Internal processes communications are secured through SOAP and WS-Security.
- Multiple clusters can be virtualized as a single cloud.
- Administrative features such as user and group management and reports.
The platform is available in an open source version and a commercial version with proprietary components, Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (Eucalyptus EE).
Eucalyptus began as a high performance computing (HPC) project directed by Professor Rich Wolski at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2009, a company called Eucalyptus Systems was created to develop the commercialized product.