Eucalyptus CEO brings the cloud down to earth

The whole idea of the private cloud is to borrow technology and techniques pioneered by public cloud providers and apply them to the data center. Eucalyptus took that idea literally. Back in 2007, six Ph.D.’s at UC Santa Barbara funded by the National Science Foundation set out to create a private cloud platform that essentially mimicked Amazon Web Services functionality and APIs.

Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus since 2010 and the former CEO of MySQL AB, never ceases to be inspired by the Amazon IaaS (infrastructure as a service) juggernaut. According to Mickos, Amazon Web Services is not just the most popular such offering by wide margin — it’s a global community and a hub of innovation.

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Eucalyptus can now emulate new Amazon Web Services functionality more closely, notes Mickos, thanks to a technology development and marketing partnership Eucalyptus struck with Amazon in March 2012. Mickos was also instrumental in a recent strategy change: Rather than maintaining one open source and one paid version, with two different code bases, as of June 2012, Eucalyptus now has a single code base under a standard GPL.

When I asked how Eucalyptus makes money, Mickos joked that, “We’re like MySQL, we give away our products free of charge, and then we make it up in volume.” In fact, Eucalyptus offers a subscription model similar to that of Red Hat, which in Eucalyptus’ case also entitles customers to special plug-ins — to support VMware’s ESX hypervisor, for example, or to integrate with EMC storage systems.

In conversation, Mickos comes across as a frank, no-nonsense guy rather than a pitchman-in-chief. The following is an edited version of my interview with him. I began by asking him to describe what Eucalyptus’ Amazon Web Services compatibility really means.

Knorr: From the beginning you’ve been seen as like the “private cloud version of Amazon Web Services.” Everybody claims API compatibility with Amazon now. To what degree are you more Amazon-like than anyone else?

Mickos: Well, we are, in many dimensions. Nobody is 100 percent the same — you will find differences, some of them stemming from the fact that running in a public cloud is just inherently different than being on-premise. But we have made sure that we have the best fidelity.

The reason why Amazon chose to partner specifically with us is that, first of all, we have Amazon API functionality natively into our product. We have EC2, S3, EBS, and IAM. We take our role in the IaaS layer very seriously, and we’re working on that and perfecting it. So we have those four sets of APIs, which is more than anybody else. We are continually fine-tuning them and making sure that we have similar error codes and similar behavior behind the API. And for that it is useful, of course, to be a partner of Amazon, because we have access to their technical people.

Knorr: From the outside, it’s difficult to tell what this partnership means, other than Amazon giving its official blessing to Eucalyptus.

Mickos: There are two activities stipulated in our partnership contract with them. One is that we do the technical work together. They do not give us code. It’s not a licensing deal. But it’s a question of knowledge transfer and them assisting us as we develop more and more AWS functionality.

Knorr: Are you seeing substantial benefit from that already? Is it something that’s coming or is it integrated into part of your regular work now?

Mickos: It is part of the regular work. I think the benefits in the market will be visible over time. They come in small portions but steadily. And let’s be clear. We had the vast majority of the work done when the partnership was signed.

But we got the ability to add things and we get input from them. As an observer of us, you may not at any point see a major shift or you won’t be able to see what came from where or why something was done. It will just look like Eucalyptus delivering new features.

Knorr: A lot of people, when they “outsource” something to the cloud, have a vague idea like, “let’s just give it to Amazon.” And very quickly they realize, wait a minute, they may actually need to hire people who have specific domain knowledge on how Amazon Web Services works. To what degree are you able to leverage the fact that there’s a community of people who understand Amazon whose skills are transferrable to running your private cloud product?

Mickos: There’s a huge ecosystem benefit. Generally, when we look at the Eucalyptus strategy and how we deal with the world, we see the AWS API compatibility as not just a technical thing. We see it as participating in an ecosystem with the highest level of innovation today.

I’ve been quoted as saying that we see Amazon’s EC2 as the new Linux. I mean this as a metaphor; it’s not an operating system. But 10 years ago, Linux was the congregation place for innovators and developers and people of the world. To be somebody and to develop something, to build something significant, you did it in or on Linux. We think that EC2 has a similar effect today. That’s where the dominant designs happen.

That’s where developers congregate, where they share code and best practices with each other, so we get this overall benefit. When Puppet does something for AWS, it also works for Eucalyptus. When RightScale supports AWS, it can also support Eucalyptus. Yes, there is that ecosystem benefit coming out of it, and it’s growing because AWS is now six years old, but it still keeps growing and adding new people and new services.

Knorr: OK, Marten. You’ve opened the door here. There’s a certain other organization that uses the Linux analogy.

Mickos: OpenStack.

Knorr: Right. OpenStack considers itself similar to the Linux kernel in the sense that it’s really something you wouldn’t download and deploy yourself, but you have this kind of ring of vendors around it, each intending to produce their own distribution.

Mickos: First of all, I think there’s a lot of good stuff happening in the OpenStack world, so I don’t want to be seen as anti-OpenStack. But I don’t think it is the Linux of cloud at all. I don’t know why they try to use the analogy because I think it doesn’t work.

I’ll tell you why. First of all, Linux was and is the creation of one single man: Linus Torvalds, who started it in 1991. For the first nearly 10 years, he developed it on his own without any corporate support. Corporate support came only in the late ’90s and Linus continues to be the chief designer of the kernel. He doesn’t design everything, but he is the benevolent dictator. In open source, you have one person or a very small team who is the steward and the governor and the holder of the design. OpenStack doesn’t have any such person or even small group of people, so that’s one difference.

Knorr: How else do you think it differs?

Mickos: The other difference is that OpenStack is essentially an industry consortium. It is driven by and operated by big vendors in this space. Some small vendors, but mostly big vendors. That wasn’t the case with Linux, not until 10 years into the project when the product already was stable. That’s why I don’t think it is the right comparison. I told them: Why do you say Linux of cloud? Shouldn’t you say Unix of cloud?

Knorr: Let’s go back to Eucalyptus — talk a little about your long-term road map. You said there were two parts to your Amazon partnership. We never got to the second, long-term part.

Mickos: Part two will be joint go-to-market activities where we will go out and approach and talk to customers together and address their needs together. However, each party sells its own stuff, so we’re not resellers for each other. But we do engage in joint customer discussions where we make sure customers get what they need. Whatever they need on-premise they get from us; whatever they need on the public cloud they get from Amazon.

Knorr: I hear that Amazon has an enterprise sales force these days.

Mickos: They do and they are very active in developing services that enterprises will need. They have a very compelling offering even for conservative enterprise buyers. That’s what’s interesting here. We are not trying to specifically influence whether people run workloads in the cloud or on-premise. We’re just trying to be available whenever they have something they want to run on-premise.

Knorr: What are your customers doing on Eucalyptus now? What sorts of workloads? What leads them to decide to bring those in house versus running them on Amazon?

Mickos: We have two main use cases. The first one is a scalable Web service. Take Puma with their consumer-facing websites or the USDA or Riot Entertainment and other gaming companies.

The other one is a dev and test environment for internal software development. Broadly these two use cases also align with our two types of customers.

The scalable Web service is typically with customers who have past experience from the public cloud, and they know the paradigm there. They love cloud, and they just need to run something on-premise. And the dev and test customers typically are corporations with data centers that they have virtualized, who are now ready to take the step into cloud — and the first use case they go into is dev and test.

There are a number of reasons people go on-premise, and like I said, we try not to try to outsmart their reasons. Here are some: In an on-premise environment they get more control over configuration and how it operates. They can choose the hardware, they can performance-tune it to what they need.

Some have existing hardware, so they just want to make good use of it. Some do it for P&L reasons: They want the flexibility to choose between rent and buy at any given time, so they move back and forth. Some do it for compliance or security reasons: They have data that they do not want in a public cloud. Some do it for sort of disaster recovery and resilience reasons: They know that if they have both Amazon cloud and an on-prem Eucalyptus cloud, if something bad happens to one of them, the other one can step in and take over the workload. Those are the main reasons.

This article, “Eucalyptus CEO brings the cloud down to earth,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog. And for the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.