Opening The Cloud: Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems
I recently spoke with Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL and current CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, the leader in private cloud platforms. Eucalyptus’ underlying technology was developed at UC Santa Barbara. Since its origin as an academic research project in 2007, Eucalyptus has become the dominant open source cloud solution, boasting over 25,000 clouds formed.
According to Marten, “We enable companies to run, within their own firewall, a cloud that behaves exactly like the public clouds, exactly like Amazon. So there is benefit of a running a cloud in-house, you have your own servers but you get full elasticity and you can shift workloads between your various applications.”
You can watch my interview with Marten below or on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/B7CIUFSbQwU
Although Eucalyptus is still a relatively small company from a personnel standpoint, it already counts twenty one of the Fortune 100 as it customers. Many of these enterprises utilize Eucalyptus to allow them to operate a hybrid cloud, with some data running on a public cloud (such as Amazon or Rackspace) while more sensitive data is managed within a private cloud. As Marten notes, “The basic need that they all have is unpredictable and variable workloads. The most typical use case is a scalable web service. A good example is the shoemaker Puma. They run all their websites on Eucalyptus. They have a number of mini-websites that they run for various products and campaigns and they cannot know which of those sites will need resources at any given point. With Eucalyptus, they are capable of switching over resources where they are needed the most.”
Eucalyptus recently launched its third generation of its enterprise solution, aptly named “Eucalyptus 3.” Marten considers the primary advancement of the company’s latest release to be its embedded high availability. “With generation three of Eucalyptus, we are adding high availability into the actual product. You have always been able to run HA (high available) applications on top of Eucalyptus, but now the cloud platform itself is actually HA.”
In addition to heading up Eucalyptus, Marten is also on the Board of fellow-cloud company, RightScale. To the casual observer, it may appear that Eucalyptus and RightScale’s respective solutions are competitive. However, as Marten makes clear, the companies are actually complementary, “RightScale is one of our closest partners and it makes perfect sense to use the two products together. We are the cloud platform, so we form the cloud for you. RightScale is the management tool of the cloud. The benefit of RightScale is that you can manage many different clouds. You can manage across AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Eucalyptus, for instance.”
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