Eucalyptus - Free Interfacing(Mocking) of Amazon Web Services
Back in Nov. 2008, I attended the informative Eucalyptus talk in the Silicon Valley cloud computing group meetup.
Eucalyptus, the academic project from Professor Rich Wolski at UC Santa Babara, is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing "cloud computing" on clusters. The current interface to Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon's EC2 and S3 interfaces.
Usually, when you develop applications that make use of EC2 or S3, you'd need to pay for every bit even though you develop on your local machine or in a staging/testing environment. Amazon is of course very happy about it. But with Eucalyptus running on your in-house hardware, your AWS-powered applications will be very happy to talk to Eucalyptus as if it's the real amazon web services. You can also test drive Eucalyptus without installing anything. Be sure to check EC2 API compatibility and S3 API compatibility first.
Who doesn't want to save some money over AWS usages? That's why RightScale and the Eucalyptus team join forces to deliver easy-to-manage open source cloud computing. Any AWS management service such as Scalr, or tool vendors that hook into AWS, such as Aptana, can make use of Eucalyptus.
If you use Amazon Simple DB, you are not out of luck because of M/DB. "M/DB is a "plug-compatible" alternative to Amazon's SimpleDB database. Outwardly, M/DB behaves identically to SimpleDB, being accessed through the same REST APIs and returning identical responses. The only difference in use is that REST requests are directed at a different domain name or IP address. Note that M/DB isn't a mock service: it's a true database."
