Eucalyptus Systems, which offers Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS)-compatible private and hybrid cloud computing software, is rolling out Eucalyptus 3.3. The program offers new services designed to accelerate and simplify the development and testing of applications built for AWS.

With this release, which is expected to be available in Q2 of 2013, Eucalyptus builds on its existing EC2, S3, EBS and IAM features. Aiming to give developers the highest level of AWS compatibility of any private cloud solution, Eucalyptus has added new application features, including auto scaling, elastic load balancing and CloudWatch, according to Andy Knosp, vice president of product at Eucalyptus.

“Eucalyptus provides the highest level of AWS compatibility, giving customers the power to decide where it makes the most sense to develop, test and run workloads,” Knosp said in a statement. “With [this] release, customers benefit from new levels of availability, increased speed, higher resource utilization and cost savings across the application development lifecycle. These benefits reinforce Eucalyptus as the private cloud of choice for any AWS application developer.”

Eucalyptus was the first private cloud platform to support Netflix OSS tools, including Chaos Monkey, Asgard and Edda, through its API fidelity with AWS, according to Adrian Cockcroft, cloud architect at Netflix.

“Thanks to this integration, those tools can now be used in both private and public cloud environments,” Cockcroft said.

In today’s software engineering organizations, developers, test engineers and QA teams are strapped with tight budgets, limited resources and shortened delivery cycles – such challenges often lead to lost productivity, lower quality and delays.

“An AWS-compatible Eucalyptus cloud can ease these pain points and accelerate time to market by providing a standardized and consistent environment that spans both a private and public cloud,” Eucalyptus said in a statement.

Engineering organizations including MemSQL, AppDynamics, Mosaik Solutions and Nokia (News - Alert) Siemens Networks have deployed Eucalyptus private clouds for continuous high-volume, large-scale testing of their applications built for AWS. Applications that test successfully on a Eucalyptus private cloud have proven ready for production deployment at unlimited scale on AWS.

Company officials touted the new AWS-compatible capabilities for hybrid cloud computing, which include the following:

• Auto Scaling: Auto Scaling allows application developers to scale Eucalyptus resources up or down based on policies defined using Amazon EC2-compatible APIs and tools. With Auto Scaling, cloud resources can be seamlessly increased or decreased to maintain performance and meet SLAs.
• Elastic Load Balancing: Elastic Load Balancing is an AWS-compatible service that distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Eucalyptus instances to provide greater fault tolerance for applications.
• CloudWatch: CloudWatch is AWS-compatible service that monitors cloud resources and applications running on Eucalyptus clouds. It provides a reliable and flexible monitoring solution which allows application developers and cloud administrators to programmatically collect metrics, set alarms, identify trends, and take action to ensure applications run smoothly.
• Resource Tagging: Resource Tagging allows application developers and cloud administrators to assign customizable metadata to resources in Eucalyptus. Resource Tags enable users to categorize cloud resources in different ways, for example, by purpose, owner, or environment. Application developers and cloud administrators can filter by tags to easily manage and monitor specific resource collections.
• Expanded Instance Types: Eucalyptus now supports an expanded set of instance types to more closely align to instances available in Amazon EC2. Cloud administrators have flexibility to customize instance types to meet specific business and technical requirements.
• Maintenance Mode: Eucalyptus provides a cloud platform to ensure greater application uptime to meet demanding SLAs. Maintenance Mode allows cloud administrators to perform maintenance on a Eucalyptus cloud with zero downtime to instances or applications running on the cloud.

“Before Eucalyptus, our engineers had to manually configure each set of nodes for distributed testing, which was incredibly slow and painful,” said Eric Frenkiel, CEO of MemSQL. “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.”