After supporting the Eucalyptus platform, reaching 25.000 cloud deployments and customers as large as Nasa, Ubuntu will abandon Eucalyptus for OpenStack, said today at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Bucarest Canonical’s Server Engineering manager.
Neil Levine, the head of the cloud initiative and one of the top execs of the company, left Canonical only a few days ago: it is very easy today to make a connection between the two events.
The latest version of OpenStack, Cactus, will be available for the 11.04 Ubuntu release: however, the change will be effective since Oneric Ocelot, where the default cloud platform will effectively be OpenStack.
Eucalyptus was part of the Ubuntu server version since 2009, with Ubuntu 9.04: OpenStack is a younger project but is quickly gaining traction and is supported by some of the biggest player (including Intel, Citrix, RightScale and Dell).
It seems relationship with Eucalyptus got worse, since Canonical had to say “we interact a lot better with OpenStack” – this probably refers to the lack of ARM support in Eucalyptus, a strategic area for Canonical which will likely be able to engineer its own solution on top of OpenStack.
Canonical will still support Eucalyptus for the rest of the support cycle, thus users of 10.04 LTS will have patches and updates until 2015 – Ubuntu 11.10 will also include Eucalyptus 3.0.