Since last year, Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos has acknowledged that his company hasn't done a great job in engaging and retaining support from the open source community. That's all changed now, according to Mickos: With today's release of Eucalyptus 3.1, the company has declared it's jettisoning separate enterprise and open source editions of its platform in favor of a single, open source option -- with the entire codebase freely available on GitHub.
Further emphasizing the company's support for the open source world, Eucalyptus 3.1 includes enterprise platform deployments for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Virtualization, as well as for VMware vCenter 5. What's more, the company is introducing a tool called FastStart, which enables users to deploy on-premise AWS-compatible IaaS clouds in under 20 minutes, according to Eucalyptus.
Beyond reaffirming its open source love -- and despite abandoning an official enterprise version of its wares -- Eucalyptus has declared its focus on serving enterprise customers, which includes small business, startups, and government agencies. The demands for that category of customers differ from those of more homogeneous service providers, a space rival CloudStack has successfully penetrated. "When you target the enterprise, you need to run on a number of different platforms and infrastructures," said Mickos. "They use different storage solutions, load balancers, compute services, and networking topologies."
Despite Eucalyptus' stated emphasis on the enterprise, the company is no longer offering separate enterprise and open source versions of its platform; instead, there's a single, open codebase available on GitHub. The company's revenue will come from software subscriptions, which include add-on proprietary integration modules, updates, and standard or premium support.
The reason for the shift, according to Mickos: "We decided that some of those constructs were overly complicated. We decided we wanted to move faster and be more open to the world. One code base allows us to move faster."
