Open-Source A.W.S.: Creating a Thousand Clouds - NYTimes.com

For those inclined to make private AWS cloud clones

“Like Amazon or not, they are the de facto standard for cloud,” says Marten Mickos, the chief executive of Eucalyptus. “It’s just that not everyone wants it. Some people in open source think it is immoral to make a profit. I don’t.” Mr. Mickos was previously the head of MySQL, an open source database company that was purchased by Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle) in 2008 for $1 billion.

Eucalyptus originated with a project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but is clearly intended to be a profit-making business. Its customers include Puma, Sony, and the federal Department of Agriculture, and it counts over 25,000 clouds running on its software worldwide. Eucalyptus runs for free when customers use open source virtualization software, necessary for cloud computing, like Xen and KVM. When customers use the more popular products from VMWare, they must use Eucalyptus’s subscription product, which costs $2,000 per server a year.

Open-Source A.W.S.: Creating a Thousand Clouds - NYTimes.com