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Apache CloudStack is a leading open-source virtualisation platform used by many global organisations. The fact that the solution is hypervisor-agnostic allows different types of enterprises to use CloudStack as a cloud orchestration no matter the rest of their tech stack.

We decided to get in touch with a few community members and ask for their perspectives on the project. In this article, CloudStack users from organisations that adopted the open-source software give their answers to the following questions: 

1)   Describe what your use case is with CloudStack?

2)   What is the primary benefit of using CloudStack against other virtualization management platforms?

3)   What is the future of the CloudStack project according to you?

We interviewed different members of the community to demonstrate and share the array of capabilities Apache CloudStack has to offer. Reading through the blog will introduce you to some of the known companies in the community, and what exactly their service offerings are. In this article you will also find out how Apache CloudStack stands out amongst other cloud orchestration platforms, for reasons such as: its ease of implementation, reliability, cost-effectiveness, it’s open-source approach and more!

 

Sven Vogel, Senior Manager R&D – Cloud and Infrastructure, EWERK

Sven is the senior R&D manager for Cloud & Infrastructure at EWERK Group. Sven is a German IT-Specialist with 15+ year’s experience in IT and a member of the Apache Software Foundation.

EWERK supports European companies in the field of system-relevant infrastructures. So far, they have supported over 500 companies who have put their trust into IT projects and consulting expertise.

  • Describe what your use case is with CloudStack?

“In general, at EWERK we use Apache CloudStack as an IaaS platform for critical infrastructures in the areas of finance, health and public infrastructure. Due to the changes and new requirements in the market, especially for micro services, the use of PaaS and the Apache CloudStack Kubernetes service is becoming increasingly important. Crucial to the success is the ability to deploy all components via API or configuration management and deployment tools, such as Ansible or Terraform.”

  • What is the primary benefit of using CloudStack against other virtualization management platforms?

“The main advantage of Apache CloudStack is its open-source approach and the involvement of a diverse community from different countries. Everyone brings their best to the project, according to their abilities.”

  • What is the future of the CloudStack project according to you? 

“I think it's important to continue to form a good community and thus prepare the development of the project for the future. Furthermore, I see various topics such as network, Kubernetes and their automation as a challenge. Good integration of the many components in all areas from hypervisor to storage must be ensured.”

 

Wido den Hollander, CTO, ClouDINfra

Wido den Hollander Is the Chief Technology Officer at ClouDINfra. He has been a part of the CloudStack community since 2012. Ever since he has contributed various parts of code like Ceph/RBD, IPv6, KVM and many other parts.

ClouDINfra’s mission is to build best-in-class digital infrastructures which scale. The company works exclusively for a select number of large web services providers and supports a significant part of the Dutch IT infrastructure and public internet. Its end-users represent anything from small (or very big) webshops to critical infrastructure.

  • Describe what your use case is with CloudStack?

“At cloudinfra we use CloudStack for our internal private cloud where we 
host the (web)services for our hundreds of thousands of customers. Using the KVM hypervisor with Ceph storage we are able to run a cost-effective yet reliable and scalable cloud platform.”

  • What is the primary benefit of using CloudStack against other virtualization management platforms?

“Being open source and governed by the ASF protects CloudStack from being influenced too much by commercial drivers and allows us to easily participate in the project.”

  • What is the future of the CloudStack project according to you? 

“Private cloud deployments which are properly connected to deployment and orchestration tooling allow for easy use and adoption of CloudStack within a company.”

 

Kshitish Purohit, Co-Founder, IndiQus Technologies

Kshitish is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at IndiQus. Kshitish has over 15 years of experience in the user experience, product management and startup domains, and has been an entrepreneur for all his career.

IndiQus is a fast-growing Cloud solutions company that works with Telecom Service Providers (Telcos, ISPs and Datacenter providers) globally and enables them to build a profitable in-country cloud business.

  • Describe what your use case is with CloudStack?

“Our Product - Apiculus - works deeply with CloudStack and offers a complete cloud customer life cycle management suite for independent cloud service providers. While CloudStack handles the technical orchestration (of Compute, Storage and Networking resources), Apiculus complements that by adding layers of billing, marketing, monitoring, support and unified marketplace capabilities.”

  • What is the primary benefit of using CloudStack against other virtualization management platforms?

“The simplicity of setting up and managing complex network architectures, along with a community that’s deeply invested in solving real-world use cases, are what, I believe, set CloudStack apart from other orchestration platforms.”

  • What is the future of the CloudStack project according to you? 

“I see CloudStack as serving two different niches in the near future. One, as enterprises are bringing their workloads ‘back’ to their premises, CloudStack is going to play a key role, as owning and managing a CloudStack setup is much more efficient (w.r.t. manpower, costs, complexity) than other orchestrators. Two, as the future is going closer and closer to the end user (Edge, Web3 etc.), the portability of CloudStack makes it an ideal candidate to embrace cloud-native and Edge-native technologies to deliver powerful orchestration capabilities nearer to the end users.”

 

Giles Sirett, CEO, ShapeBlue

Giles is the CEO and founder of ShapeBlue. He is responsible for overall company strategy, strategic relationships, finance and sales. He is also a committer and PMC member of the Apache CloudStack project and Chairman of the European CloudStack User Group, actively helping promote brand awareness of the technology.

ShapeBlue is the largest independent integrator of CloudStack technologies globally and are specialists in the design and implementation of IaaS cloud infrastructures for both private and public cloud implementations.

  • Describe what your use case is with CloudStack?

“ShapeBlue’s use case with CloudStack is different to most organisations who are using CloudStack. Most organisations are using CloudStack to drive either public cloud implementation or to orchestrate internally within an enterprise. As ShapeBlue is the company that provides services around CloudStack, we see our role as representing those customers in the open-source project. Secondary to that, we do use CloudStack in our own internal CI/CD environment, but that is a relatively small scale compared to most people using CloudStack.” 

  • What is the primary benefit of using CloudStack against other virtualization management platforms?

“Against other IaaS orchestration platforms, CloudStack has got two key advantages: A) Ease of deployment - whereas a lot of other platforms are incredibly complex to deploy. B) Reliability – CloudStack has been around for over a decade, it’s very stable, it’s very well-known, it’s in production use at many of the world’s largest organisations.”

  • What is the future of the CloudStack project according to you? 

“CloudStack’s scope will remain tightly defined. CloudStack does not have aspirations to become a new block storage platform or to become a container orchestrator, it’s highly defined at the level, which is the virtualised based orchestration layer. CloudStack will become increasingly reliable, increasingly easy to deploy, and effectively we hope will just become boring.”

 

Philipp Reisner, CEO, LINBIT

Philipp Reisner is one of the founders and CEO of LINBIT. His professional career has been dominated by developing DRBD, a storage replication software for Linux.

LINBIT is an Open Source company offering enterprise-level support subscriptions for its Open Source technologies.

  • Describe what your use case is with CloudStack?

“LINBIT develops a software-defined storage solution that is seamlessly integrated with CloudStack. As CloudStack, it is OpenSource software composed out of DRBD, LINSTOR, and LVM/ZFS.”

  • What is the primary benefit of using CloudStack against other virtualization management platforms?

“As LINBIT's SDS is available for multiple cloud software stacks and enterprise virtualization stacks, we have a bit of insight into multiple communities. The CloudStack community is thriving, and we see that CloudStack is heavily adopted in mid-sized deployments.”

  • What is the future of the CloudStack project according to you? 

“I expect CloudStack will find more large-scale adopters as the hype around the big competing technology cools off.”

 

Grégoire Lamodière, Founder, DIMSI

Grégoire Lamodière is the Co-founder of DIMSI. Grégoire is a software architect who spends most of his time designing infrastructure applications and CRM systems, on-premise or multi-cloud based. He’s been using Apache CloudStack for many years, and likes to keep knowledge and data outside black-boxes.

DIMSI is a French managed service provider, which designs and implements IT solutions adapted to the needs of its customers. Some of their areas of expertise include cloud infrastructure & hosting and digital transformation.

  • Describe what your use case is with CloudStack? 

“At DIMSI, we use Apache CloudStack to run our high-availability, eco-friendly and managed cloud infrastructure. Our customers make intensive use of Linux and Windows instances to build enterprise applications, virtual desktop or web apps. We’ve also developed a backup solution that runs on top of Cloudstack: Backroll.” 

  • What is the primary benefit of using CloudStack against other virtualization management platforms?

“Apache CloudStack is open-source, all-in-one, reliable, fast and cost-effective solution.”

  •  What is the future of the CloudStack project according to you? 

“At DIMSI, we think that these 2 technologies could change the game: FAAS (function as a service): gives users opportunities to run functions rather than instances, in the same way as Kubernetes plugin SDN: improve SDN support, such as the current Tungsten plugin, is the way to go.”

After reading all of the different use cases, you likely have a stronger understanding on the many ways in which Apache CloudStack can be implemented. We would also love to hear your success story with CloudStack. You can do by sharing it with us on the mailing lists (https://cloudstack.apache.org/mailing-lists.html) or tagging @cloudstack on social media.