Koala

With all the fuzz around Cannes.. oh wait .. nothing happened there.. that was the most boring event ever wasn’t it … we forgot to focus on where the real action is happening …

When the 9.10 Ubuntu Release, Karmic Koala, hits the wire it will be Cloud Ready or Virtualization ready or whatever you want to call it. Ubuntu wants to keep Open Source and Free software where it belongs, the key components of Cloud Computing. We have to agree that it are the Open Source Hypervisors that are the being used in the fundaments of Cloud Computing.

Ubuntu will be embracing the API’s of Amazon EC2 and will make it easier for every body to build their own Private Clouds using Open Source tools. Ubuntu-vmbuilder allows you to create a custom AMI , however they also provide a set of standard images to be used. Apart from deploying Ubuntu instances on the existing clouds, Karma Koala will live very happy in his favourite Eucalyptus trees

In Plain English, Ubuntu has recently welcomed the Eucalyptus framework in it’s software repositories, and it will be part of the upcoming release 9.4 already. (Eucalyptus being the open-source infrastructure for implementing Elastic Cloud computing using computing clusters which has an interface-compatible that is with Amazon.com’s EC2 which we covered earlier)

Now if you remember Ubuntu was one of the first Linux distributions to go for KVM rather than Xen, given its desktop-oriented nature. Amazon build it’s infrastructure on Xen. So Originally Eucalyptus was a mostly Xen supporting Framework, but lots of things have changed and today Eucalyptus supports both Xen, KVM and VMWare mostly using LibVirt, making it hypervisor-agnostic.

We’re going to let you discover what the Washington-based startup BlueBear is trying to do with Koala (“the world’s smallest, most powerful virtualization-ready server”) and Kodiak (“the industry’s only application that’s both hypervisor-agnostic and cross-platform”) for yourself on their fun and informative website.

Here’s the takeaway:

Kodiak is largely built on Adobe AIR, is deployable on Windows, Mac and Linux, provides native support for VMware and Xen servers (Hyper-V support planned), comes with a visual map user interface, and allows unlimited consoles. Not only is it free of cost, its soon to be shared SDK coupled with Adobe’s Flex IDE allows high extensibility for end-user customization. Watch the teaser video here.

We’d use it if only for the fun names and cool website copywriting (“written and optimized from scratch by actual bears, …”), but unfortunately, it’s invite-only so far.

[Source: Flex RIA]