Eucalyptus: An Open-Source Cloud Computing Infrastructure

Utility computing, elastic computing, and cloud computing are all terms that refer to the concept of dynamically provisioning processing time and storage space from a ubiquitous "Cloud" of computational resources. Such systems allow users to acquire and release the resources on demand and provide ready access to data from processing elements, while relegating the physical location and exact parameters of the resources. Over the past few years, such systems have become increasingly popular, but nearly all current cloud computing offerings are either proprietary or depend upon software infrastructure that is invisible to the research community. In this paper, the authors present Eucalyptus, an open-source software implementation of cloud computing that utilizes compute resources that are typically available to researchers, such as clusters and workstation farms.