Plinga Chooses Eucalyptus for Private Online Gaming Cloud

Is there life after Ubuntu? Eucalyptus Systems has announced that well-known European social game publisher Plinga has chosen to move from Amazon Web Services onto a private cloud powered by its software platform. This is an especially important symbolic victory for Eucalyptus in the wake of losing the technology backing of Canonical’s Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. And it goes a little ways toward backing up the company’s claim that OpenStack won’t affect its business. Here’s the scoop.

Plinga currently hosts more than 30 games across 20 social networks for the European market, which apparently includes six of the top 20 most popular in Germany and five of the top 10 games in Poland. The company had been using Amazon Web Services, according to the press release, but eventually found it to be cheaper to use a private cloud.

A major benefit of the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition platform, as company hype has it, is that it turns legacy hardware into a scalable, elastic, Amazon EC2-compatible private cloud. For Plinga, that means it was able to make the migration with a minimum of effort. The company is anticipating the same benefits as when it was on the Amazon public cloud, for a fraction of the cost.

Interestingly, the company’s press release builds on Eucalyptus’ earlier momentum statement of 25,000 deployed clouds with a quote from CEO Marten Mickos in which he claims Eucalyptus is “the most widely deployed software platform for on-premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.”

How true that is remains to be seen. But we’ll be keeping a close eye on Eucalyptus’ progress in the market going forward.

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