Cloud platform company Eucalyptus Systems has put its Eucalyptus 3 source code on Github in a move designed to align both open source and "other" enterprise developers to its own central platform. The company says it is aiming to accelerate on-premise cloud innovation by making it easy for open source community development of enterprise-grade on-premise IaaS clouds.

Other community-focused extensions here include enterprise platform deployments for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, VMware vCenter 5, and a few other project management capabilities for defects, fixes, and feature requests.

A new service called FastStart now appears to allow users to deploy on-premise AWS-compatible IaaS cloud servers in under 20 minutes. The argument from Eucalyptus is that hybrid cloud computing is the next phase of enterprise cloud adoption; but one of the most challenging aspects of this approach is having the solutions in place to quickly deploy and manage the implementation.

Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos argues that this 3.1 release brings enterprise-grade cloud computing to the "open source communities of the world". "With FastStart deployed clouds, users can easily browse and install euStore images to experience their first cloud usage on their own infrastructure. For more advanced users, Eucalyptus offers SilverEye, a suite of installation tools that allows installation and configuration of more complex Eucalyptus deployments," he said.

In addition to the complete source code for Eucalyptus 3.1, all new development activity will occur on Github as well. Defect and feature tracking will also be publicly available so that any member of the Eucalyptus community can file a bug report, request a feature, or keep track of the progress of the latest release.