Cloud computing systems fundamentally provide access to large pools of data and computational resources through a variety of interfaces similar in spirit to existing grid and HPC resource management and programming systems. These types of systems offer a new programming target for scalable application developers and have gained popularity over the past few years. However, most cloud computing systems in operation today are proprietary, rely upon infrastructure that is invisible to the research community, or are not explicitly designed to be instrumented and modified by systems researchers.

In this work, we present EUCALYPTUS – an open-source software framework for cloud computing that implements what is commonly referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); systems that give users the ability to run and control entire virtual machine instances deployed across a variety physical resources. We outline the basic principles of the EUCALYPTUS design, detail important operational aspects of the system, and discuss architectural trade-offs that we have made in order to allow
Eucalyptus to be portable, modular and simple to use on infrastructure commonly found within academic settings. Finally, we provide evidence that EUCALYPTUS enables users familiar with existing Grid and HPC systems to explore new cloud computing functionality while maintaining access to existing, familiar application development software and Grid middle-ware.