Cloud platforms of the future: Hadoop and Eucalyptus
Without a doubt, the cloud and all its forms and meanings were big news in 2008. Besides the huge growth of Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine, we saw Salesforce launch Force.com, a true platform-as-a-service.
My picks for the most interesting software of 2008 are Hadoop and Eucalyptus.
Hadoop is an Apache project, the "open source implementation of MapReduce, a powerful tool designed for the detailed analysis and transformation of very large data sets," which basically means you can process a ton of data on commodity hardware.
Hadoop is going commercial through Cloudera and while details are not publicly available, let's just say there are some very important and interesting foundations being laid for the way that people deal with computing and processing power.
Eucalyptus is an "open-source software infrastructure for implementing 'cloud computing' on clusters. The current interface to Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. Eucalyptus is implemented using commonly available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain."
In layman's terms, Eucalyptus makes a group of Linux boxes act very similar to Amazon EC2, which means someday soon you will be able to run an internal cloud.
The fact that both of these platforms are open source speaks to two aspects of the evolution of the cloud.
- There is an appetite for software that is more bleeding-edge or like an "invention" to be open source as enterprises (and developers) want to be able to tweak it to their needs.
- Fewer and fewer companies are willing to plunk down huge dollar amounts for something that may/may not suit their needs. It will be difficult to justify spending anything in 2009, let alone for software that you haven't proven already.
The cloud will continue to evolve, but these two projects and the respective commercial efforts behind them will be interesting to watch.
Disclosure: I am an advisor to Eucalyptus.
Dave Rosenberg dishes up "Software, Interrupted" with nearly 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs to open-source enterprise software companies. He is co-founder of MuleSource and currently serves as the general manager of Hardy Way. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can contact Dave via e-mail at softwareinterrupted@gmail.com.
It differs from either Hadoop or Eucalyptus in its focus. 10gen is providing a Platform as a Service for developers (currently supporting Ruby, Python, and JavaScript). The main point is that the developer can focus on their business, and the 10gen platform takes care of the underlying aspects of scalability, replication, and availability.
Download the quick start SDK, and sign up for free space in 10gen's cloud during our alpha period! Join the 10gen community and let us know what features are missing. Help us test it out, and have a hand in developing the next generation of technology.
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I thought the "idea" of the "cloud" is that it moved the functions of system management (capacity planning, configuration management, security, backup etc) to a service provider, so what would I gain by implementing an "internal cloud" apart from turmoil.
Eucalyptus seems an odd choice of name, given their propensity to burst into flame.
AT - Sydney Australia