We get lots of people who want to use Eucalyptus as a way to learn about how cloud computing works at a code level. Which is great: Freedom to Learn is one of the fundamental Free Software guarantees.
So what’s my advice to users who want to learn about Eucalyptus? It’s pretty simple.
1. Get a tiny Euca cloud running. The perfect tool for this is eucadev. If you’ve got a laptop that supports Vagrant, you’ve got a Euca cloud. It’s a small cloud, to be sure, but it’s got all of the key features required for cloud orchestration, and it’s a tool that our own developers use.
2. Find a problem to solve! The best way to learn about a codebase is to dig into it with a clear goal in mind. If you don’t yet have a clear goal, we’ve got a great list of open bugs that are tagged as “fruit” (of the low-hanging variety) to get you started.
3. Create your own local branch of the Eucalyptus source, and start hacking! An explanation of how to do this can be found in the README for Eucadev.
There’s really no substitute for getting your hands into code. Dig in. If you get stuck, swing by #eucalyptus-devel on freenode and ask for help. (After you’ve read through the docs and Googled a bit, of course.)
Greg DeKoenigsberg Speaks 