DIY Cloud ?

I've mentioned Amazon EC2 a few times here. But did you know that you could build your own elastic cloud infrastructure instead of using Amazon's?

Eucalyptus is software that was originally developed as a research project in the Computer Science Department, at the University of California Santa Barbara. Now it has been spun off as an open source commercial venture to continue its development. Eucalyptus is largely compatible with Amazon's API's.

From the Eucalyptus FAQ: "Eucalyptus is a private cloud-computing platform that implements the Amazon specification for EC2, S3, and EBS. Eucalyptus conforms to both the syntax and the semantic definition of the Amazon API and tool suite, with few exceptions. Along with providing a REST and SOAP interface compatible with Amazon AWS, Eucalyptus also exposes administrative functionalities (e.g., user management, storage configuration, network management, hypervisor configuration, etc.) for managing and maintaining the cloud. Our implementation of the specification, however, is undoubtedly different than Amazon's implementations. These differences are related to several engineering design decisions. Our primary goal is to provide an open-source software tool for community distribution that is highly scalable and extensible, as well as easy to install and maintain."

Check it out and let me know what you think.