Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Architecture

Interesting white paper on Ubuntu's approach to cloud computing architectures.

Overview

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) brings Amazon EC2-like infrastructure capabilities inside the firewall. The UEC is powered by Eucalyptus, an open source implementation for the emerging standard of the EC2 API. This solution is designed to simplify the process of building and managing an internal cloud for businesses of any size, thereby enabling companies to create their own self-service infrastructure.

As the technology is open source, it requires no licence fees or subscription for use, experimentation or deployment. Updates are provided freely and support contracts can be purchased directly from Canonical.

UEC is specifically targeted at those companies wishing to gain the benefits of self-service IT within the confines of the corporate data centre whilst avoiding either lock-in to a specific vendor, expensive re-occurring product licences or the use of non-standard tools that aren't supported by public providers.

This white paper tries to provide an understanding of the UEC internal architecture and possibilities offered by it in terms of security, networking and scalability. 

http://www.ubuntu.com/system/files/UbuntuEnterpriseCloudWP-Architecture-20090820.pdf