Eucalyptus Overview

Eucalyptus is open source software for building AWS-compatible private and hybrid clouds. As an Infrastructure as a Service product, Eucalyptus allows you to flexibly provision your own collections of resources (both compute and storage), on an as-needed basis.

Who Should Read this Guide?

This guide is for Eucalyptus users who wish to run application workloads on a Eucalyptus cloud.

What’s in this Guide?

This guide contains instructions for users of the Eucalyptus cloud platform. While these instructions apply generally to all tools capable of interacting with Eucalyptus, such as the Eucalyptus Management Console or the AWS S3 toolset, but the primary focus is on the use of Euca2ools (Eucalyptus command line tools). The following is an overview of the contents of this guide.

How do I …? Related Topic
Begin using and configuring Eucalyptus getting_started
Run and control with virtual machine (VM) instances using_instances
Use Eucalyptus’ elastic block storage using_block_storage
Apply tags and filters resource_and_tags
Manage access for groups and users using_access
Understand the Eucalyptus VM networking and security features networking_security
Use Eucalyptus’ Auto Scaling features autoscaling_intro
Use elastic load balancing elb_intro
Generate metrics about my cloud using_monitoring
Use scalable object storage osg_using
Use CloudFormation cf_overview
Use Virtual Private Cloud vpc_intro

Eucalyptus Features

Eucalyptus offers ways to implement, manage, and maintain your own collection of virtual resources (machines, network, and storage). The following is an overview of these features.

AWS API compatibility

Eucalyptus provides API compatibility with Amazon Web Services, to allow you to use familiar tools and commands to provision your cloud.

Block- and bucket-based storage abstractions

Eucalyptus provides storage options compatible with Amazon’s EBS (block-based) and S3 (bucket-based) storage products.

Self-service capabilities

Eucalyptus offers a Management Console, allowing your users to request the resources they need, and automatically provisioning those resources where available.

Web-based Interface

The Eucalyptus Management Console is accessible from any device via a browser. The Console initial page provides a Dashboard view of components available to you to manage, configure, provision, and generate various reports.

Resource Management

Eucalyptus offers tools to seamlessly manage a variety of virtual resources. The following is an overview of the types of resources your cloud platform.

SSH Key Management

Eucalyptus employs public and private keypairs to validate your identity when you log into VMs using SSH. You can add, describe, and delete keypairs.

Image Management

Before running instances, someone must prepare VM images for use in the cloud. This can be an administrator or a user. Eucalyptus allows you to bundle, upload, register, describe, download, unbundle, and deregister VM images.

Linux Guest OS Support

Eucalyptus lets you run your own VMs in the cloud. You can run, describe, terminate, and reboot a wide variety of Linux-based VMs that were prepared using image management commands.

IP Address Management

Eucalyptus can allocate, associate, disassociate, describe, and release IP addresses. Depending on the networking mode, you might have access to public IP addresses that are not statically associated with a VM ( Elastic IPs ). Eucalyptus provides tools to allow users to reserve and dynamically associate these elastic IPs with virtual machines.

Security Group Management

Security groups are sets of firewall rules applied to VMs associated with the group. Eucalyptus lets you create, describe, delete, authorize, and revoke security groups. How much of these things can a typical user actually do?

Volume and Snapshot Management

Eucalyptus allows you to create dynamic block volumes. A dynamic block volume is similar to a raw block storage device that can be used with virtual machines. You can create, attach, detach, describe, bundle, and delete volumes. You can also create and delete snapshots of volumes and create new volumes from snapshots.