CS 401 – Does Eucalyptus Fail?

My homework assignment (besides continuing my ongoing struggle with installing Eucalyptus) was to take a look at Tom “Spot” Callaway‘s “How to tell if a FLOSS project is doomed to FAIL” and see how many points of fail that the Eucalyptus project has. I had the pleasure of meeting Spot and hearing him give this talk at Western New England College and it was very entertaining.

Now, how badly does Eucalyptus fail? By my calculations they had 55 points of fail which means that “Babies cry when your code is downloaded”. I think I may have been a bit too rough with my analysis. I really do like the Eucalyptus project, but as a new user that is also completely new to the cloud computing concept, it’s hard to figure out exactly what to do and how to do it. There is documentation but there is not enough of it. From my understanding the Eucalyptus team acknowledges that and one of our goals this semester is to improve documentation for users, and who better to write documentation for new users than… new users!

In addition to the documentation fails (I forgive you, Eucalyptus devs, I hate writing documentation as well ;), as far as I can tell there are no unit tests for the source code to check for bugs that may have creeped in. That alone earned Eucalyptus +25 points of fail and pushed the project into the crying babies category.

Once again, from what I have seen, the Eucalyptus project is great. Their developers have been supportive and responsive when I’ve had issues. As a FOSS advocate, the freedom of using a free and open source cloud computing platform far outweighs the convenience of a proprietary system that is easier for newcomers. Eucalyptus is much more win than fail, and I hope that my class can help the developers improve the usability of the software.

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