RightScale, the cloud manager, is supporting the open source Eucalyptus Public Cloud (EPC) run by the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) for purposes of cloud research and experimentation. RightScale and Eucalyptus want to tickle widespread cloud development and adoption, and figure that letting people test and evaluate their applications on the UCSB cluster will get the ball rolling.

The Eucalyptus environment is designed for anything from a small student application to a massive enterprise-level cloud deployment on Amazon's EC2.

RightScale and the Eucalyptus Project Team are also collaborating to deliver a more robust private cloud for organizations whose testing requirements extend beyond those offered by the EPC.

Eucalyptus stands for "Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems" and its current interface is EC2-compatible, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces.

Eucalyptus can be downloaded for free and installed on any set of servers to create a private EC2-compatible cloud computing system.

Last month RightScale announced a new strategic initiative to become the first cloud management platform to support multiple cloud environments. So far that includes EC2, FlexiScale and GoGrid. It's also working with Rackspace Hosting to support its Mosso and CloudFS infrastructures.

According to Rich Wolski, a professor in the Computer Science Department at UCSB and director of the Eucalyptus project, "Deploying scalable, reliable applications from scratch in a multi-cloud world is a time-consuming and expensive task. Eucalyptus makes it possible to use RightScale's top-quality management platform and expertise to make this easy and cost-effective for both a local IT infrastructure and many of the popular public clouds. The combination of RightScale and Eucalyptus is clearly an excellent way to achieve federation between public and private cloud platforms."

A cloud, as RightScale will be happy to remind you, is just a collection of barebones virtual servers and by its lights most organizations don't have the expertise or resources to deploy and manage cloud computing applications cost-effectively and according to best practices.

RightScale widgetry is supposed to provides rapid cloud deployment and a dynamically scalable infrastructure to meet varying traffic and loads, using minimal resources. Its core offerings include automated system management, pre-packaged and reusable components and service expertise.

The EPC is open to anyone for evaluation purposes, with specific server number and time limitations. See https://eucalyptus.rightscale.com/users/new.

The perspective private cloud will offer full Eucalyptus and RightScale functionality and be accessible by invitation only. See sales@rightscale.com

• Exclusive Q&A with Cloud Computing CEO Michael Crandell
• RightScale & New Relic Deliver Rails Performance Management in the Cloud