The Eucalyptus Public Cloud (EPC) is a sandbox environment in which members of the our community can testdrive and experiment with Eucalyptus. Eucalyptus is an open source software framework for cloud computing that implements what is commonly referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The EPC, via the Eucalyptus software, provides users with the ability to run and control isolated collections of virtual machine instances with many EC2/S3-compatible tools.

The EPC is currently hosted at UCSB, which is the birth place of Eucalyptus. Over the past year, we have had over 2,000 individuals register for accounts on the EPC. These users can exercise the full capabilities of Eucalyptus, which includes utilizing command-line tools, using third-party software that interacts with Eucalyptus, building images, running these images, etc.

Due to the popularity of the EPC, Eucalyptus Systems Inc. is in the process of deploying a larger Eucalyptus Public Cloud (EPC). The new EPC will be located at a start-of-the art colocation facility, will reside on the latest hardware, and will feature the most recent version (v1.6.2) of Eucalyptus.