Maureen O'Gara

Eucalyptus Systems, Amazon’s private cloud partner, was expected to announce a new 3.3 release of its open source cloud platform Monday that promises its greatest compatibility with AWS yet.

Its new capabilities are also supposed to make Eucalyptus the solution for developing and testing applications built for AWS. Users get new levels of availability, speed, resource utilization and cost savings across the application development lifecycle.

Eucalyptus is supposed to make the whole test-dev process faster and easier since it provides a standardized and consistent environment that spans both a private and public cloud. As a result, applications that test successfully on a Eucalyptus private cloud have reportedly proven ready for production deployment at unlimited scale on AWS.

MemSQL, AppDynamics, Mosaik Solutions and Nokia Siemens Networks have already deployed Eucalyptus private clouds for continuous high- volume, large-scale testing of their AWS applications.

MemSQL, for one, has reportedly saved scads of time. CEO Eric Frenkiel said in a statement that “Before Eucalyptus, our engineers had to manually configure each set of nodes for distributed testing, which was incredibly slow and painful. Now, we can set up and run new instances in just 30 seconds. This allows our engineers to quickly run thousands of tests, and deliver the highest-quality product.”

Eucalyptus is the first private cloud to run Netflix OSS tools, including Chaos Monkey, Asgard and Edda.

Netflix is Amazon’s biggest customer and its widgetry is understood to be lashed the tightest to the Amazon platform – even if it’s still working on it.

Eucalyptus’ ability to run the tools is supposed to prove its deep Amazon compatibility and the fidelity of its APIs to Amazon’s, something Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockcroft testifies to.

Eucalyptus, which has added Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing and CloudWatch and has built on its existing EC2, S3, EBS, and IAM features, claims to have the highest level of AWS compatibility of any private cloud solution.

Application developers and cloud admins can now add assign customizable metadata to resources in Eucalyptus to categorize cloud resources in different ways (resource tagging).

It also supports an expanded set of instance types more closely aligned to EC2 instances and let cloud administrators do maintenance on a Eucalyptus cloud with zero downtime to instances or applications running on the cloud.

CEO Marten Mickos (pictured) says Eucalyptus has gotten over any early “teething problems” and now has a “good degree of paying customers.” It’s starting to benefit from its Amazon connection although Amazon is always a bit touchy about any hybrid paradigm.

He also thinks that OpenStack, his biggest open source rival, isn’t taking the Amazon standard seriously enough and that Rackspace, which put OpenStack in gear, doesn’t have the muscle to make much of dent in Amazon’s hegemony.

He suspects that – for all of OpenStack’s 150 adherents including IBM – the widgetry may ultimately become a Red Hat product. Red Hat can mold it for large accounts and push it into the enterprise, using it to scratch out at VMware, which it sees as its primary rival. VMware doesn’t support Amazon APIs either.

Meanwhile, in four or five years AWS will probably be doing $20 billion a year.

Eucalyptus 3.3 will be available this quarter.