An Update from Eucalyptus’s CTO and Founder

June 8, 2011

Yesterday at Cloud Expo I bumped in to Dr. Rich Wolski, CTO and co-founder of Cloud player, Eucalyptus.  It had been a while since we had last talked so I grabbed some time with him and got him to give me the skinny:

Some of the ground Rich covers:

  • Eucalyptus’s major release which is coming out in the next 4 weeks
  • [0:40] The RightScale myCloud integration that they announced yesterday (linking Eucalyptus private clouds with various public clouds)
  • [2:01] Eucalyptus’s relationship with Canonical and how their interests are diverging
  • [3:15] Where specifically Eucalyptus is targeted
  • [4:25] What are some of their goals and product features they’d like to add over the next year

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

The Cloud is a marathon — Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus CEO

June 24, 2010

Yesterday at the GigaOM Structure conference here in San Francisco, I ran into Marten Mickos, the recently appointed CEO of Eucalyptus systems.  Eucalyptus is one of the key ingredients in the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud that is being certified to run on Dell’s PowerEdge C systems as part of our cloud ISV program.

Marten, the former CEO of MySQL took the helm of Eucalyptus about three months ago, and was at Structure both as an attendee and participant, sitting on two panels at this two-day cloud-a-polooza.  At the end of the day-one I got some time with Marten and asked him about his new gig.

Some of the topics Marten tackles:

  • How he made the decision to go to Eucalyptus. (Hint: he asked the question, what’s bigger than Open Source)
  • What is Eucalyptus and whats it based on?
  • How will Marten’s experience at MySQL and Sun help him in his new role at Eucalyptus?
    • MySQL was a disrupter of the old whereas Eucalyptus is an innovator of the new.
    • Sun’s company culture was phenomenal, the technology was phenomenal, the business…um…
  • What Eucalyptus is doing with Canonical and the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.
  • What Eucalyptus is focusing on for the next year.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Brian Aker discusses Drizzle, DB for the Cloud

August 18, 2009

On the first day of Open Source World/Cloud World/Etc World I attended Brian Aker’s talk entitled “Drizzle, Rethinking MySQL for the Web.”  For those not in the know, Drizzle is a reworking of the MySQL database to slim it down and make it more appropriate for web-infrastructure and cloud computing .  I caught up with Brian after his talk to learn a little bit more about Drizzle, where its come from and where its going.

Some of the topics that Brian tackles:

  • Looking at what customer needs were not being addressed by MySQL.
  • Stripping stuff out of MySQL and setting up Drizzle as a microkernel design that modules can be added to.
  • One of the main goals was to allow greater community involvement in the development (currently Sun folks only make up 6-7% of those making contributions).
  • Is Drizzle production ready?
  • What cloud bits have been contributed to the project?
  • Why the name “Drizzle”?

Update:  Here’s the Register article based on this entry.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

RightScale part 1: Mickos joins and control moves up the stack

June 17, 2009

Yesterday I attended a webinar that RightScale put on entitled: How to Build Scalable Websites in the Cloud.  It was basically a welcome to RightScale, welcome to the cloud presentation but overall interesting and credible.

The presenters were their CEO, their head of marketing and a mini team of techies.  Below is part one of some of my thoughts and takeaways.  But first a slight digression…

Enter the Dolphin Master

One thing I noticed during the presentation and which warmed my heart was that MySQL played prominently in a bunch of the slides.  It was only today when I was poking around the RightScale site that I saw the press release from a few weeks ago announcing that Marten Mickos, former MySQL CEO and Sun employee joined the RightScale board of directors.  Its interesting but not surprising to note in the release that Marten calls out Sun and Canonical (the commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu) as two strategic partners helping to expand the RightScale ecosystem.

Where Right Scale fits within the tri-sected cloud.

Where Right Scale fits within the tri-sected cloud.

Where they play in the Cloud(s)

RightScale positions themselves as a cloud management platform or as I like to think of it “a cloud tamer.”  If you split the cloud in three — software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service — they play in the last space. Basically Right Scale sits on top of Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) and can handle all the tricky bits so you don’t have to.

Choose or choose not to choose

For those who want more control over their infrastructure RightScale will allow you to “choose among a variety of development languages, software stacks, data stores and cloud providers.” For those less intrepid in the cloud they have server templates that you can start off with.

One of the key benefits they stressed was getting rid of vendor lock-in, “so that you never get locked in to a single provider.”  You’ll notice on the X axis above they show lock-in decreasing and portability increasing as you move to the right.  My question however is that with Right Scale aren’t you simply locked in to a different layer of the cloud?  Doesn’t the control point simply move up the stack?  Just wondering…

Tune in tomorrow for part deux!

Extra Credit Reading/Listening

  • What is MySQL founder Monty Widenius up to post MySQL/post Sun? The Open Database Alliance and his MariaDB – May ’09
  • An interview with Marten Mickos, the day the MySQL deal with Sun closed — Feb ’08.
  • An interview with Marten Mickos after he keynoted Canonical’s first (and last) Ubuntu Live — Aug ’07.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George