CloudStack Reviews

We use Apache CloudStack to provide Public IaaS cloud services in Switzerland at two locations. Together with our own fiber optic-based private network, it features guaranteed latencies of under 0.5 ms per 80 km and optical encryption. We offer the highest level of security and confidentiality to our customers.

Due to much simpler setup (in comparison to other IaaS products), Apache CloudStack has enabled us to achieve a rapid time to market. It helped us exponentially grow our customer base and required hardware, without seriously increasing our in-house engineering efforts. CloudStack’s development community is excellent and has always been very supportive and helpful in solving any problems and it’s always great to be part of this kind of vendor independent community.

Being able to completely virtualize a customer’s physical data center and migrate any workload into the cloud, and cover the most complex use cases - while offering high performance and true volume QoS, backed by SSD-based managed storage - is what differentiates it from other IaaS solutions.

CloudStack’s private gateway networking feature is what enables us to offer utmost security and confidentially to our customers and partners, by enabling them to connect to their virtual data centers via dedicated, encrypted, private fiber lines that never touch the public internet space. Ease of setup and management are certainly important additional benefits for us on the engineering team.

There are some minor things that can be improved even more such as, perhaps, a bit more polishing on the GUI side to catch up with the API possibilities (which are really extensive) but otherwise nothing critical.

New features are being developed daily and the product is constantly improved with new features and bug fixes. Currently, one interesting thing that is being seriously improved is the redundant virtual router capability, which enables zero downtime for customers during certain maintenance operations and cloud version upgrades.

We rate Apache CloudStack a pure 10 out of 10 for its extremely versatile environment, rich feature set that can cover even the most complex customer requirements, and the ease of management.

We use this solution for two things; the first is the handling of all of our virtual machines through centralization, and the second is the orchestration of services.

This is one of the major products that help to handle all of the NFV Infrastructure management services (IaaS). It has helped us to quickly gain understanding and feel more powerful with respect to virtualization.

The three features that I find most valuable are:

• It is user-friendly.
• It is scalable.
• The ease of API use. When you compare it with OpenStack, CloudStack is something that you can deploy faster on because you have fewer components and more services. You can use a single API to get things done, rather than multiple APIs on multiple modules.

One area that needs improvement is the stability. It is stable, but there are issues. It is related to the lack of support for an open source product. It comes down to needing more active people in the product's open source user community.

There are release notes with the product, but I would like to see more documentation. For example, it would be nice to have instructions on how to integrate with DPDK (Data plane developer kit) because it would make it much easier.

I would like to see support for native VLAN, and fault-tolerance.

The stability is problematic, in part, because there is no support. It is an open source product, so similar to OpenStack there is community involvement. One challenge, however, is that it is a small community of users compared to OpenStack. There are professional services available by multiple vendors, so you can leverage that if you wish to.

It becomes an issue when there are new problems and you do not have support for them to be fixed. Otherwise, the product is good. If it is working fine then it will continue to work until something changes.

If you are stuck with a problem then it may take between a couple of days and a couple of months to solve it. It may require research, but it is challenging because you do not have a major community of people.

I would say that the product scalability is good. It is very scalable, but it requires some additional effort from the user's side, or the administrator's side, to understand the product well before making changes to the environment. Research has to be done, and a POC may be required.

For example, it is possible to integrate this solution with Ceph Storage or load balancers, and it will handle it, but you have to do some research first. Similarly, if you want to integrate it with a public DNS or an internal DNS, you will have to test it well before integrating it.

We currently have fifteen users, but it is a system administration tool so there is not much customer-centric traffic. This is actually one of the major benefits that you have. Even with fifteen people, doing the same thing or otherwise, it allows you to have your own space without overriding the other person. It allows you to be multi-tenant.

They have zone features that allow you to keep your local environment, so if you want to deploy multiple cloud stacks, you do not need to. You can keep just one cloud stack and integrate with all of the servers at once. This is in contrast to OpenStack, where you have to deploy one OpenStack per region or per area so that all of your computers can be centrally managed.

Our usage will increase as we add more servers, or expand our services.

There is no technical support available because it is an open source, community-based product. However, certain people can still provide you with technical support. This technical assistance is a paid service, separate from the community itself. It is a group of experts and I would say that they are good enough. If you don't feel comfortable using the product, or there are stability issues that you frequently see, you can buy professional services.

This product has been in use since I joined the company.

It is simple to perform the initial setup. Compared to OpenStack, it is really straightforward and simple. The deployment will take a couple of hours.

You will need at least two or three people to maintain the solution. It is a complex environment, even though it has a very simple GUI. The back-end system, such as the database or the application itself, definitely requires at least four to five good people who are able to handle issues in the CloudStack environment.

This is less maintenance than is required for other solutions, but expertise is still needed.

We handled the implementation in-house.

The ROI is there. While there is no cost to the product, there is an infrastructure cost. ROI is realized in time savings, and in community-based products, the major investment is your time. 

If you integrate with other products you can do fault tolerance, too.

The bottom line is that the ROI is there provided you invest your time in it. If you do then you will be well paid for it, because the product will help you to easily grow your environment, and make it scale faster.

There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services. You need to pay for your infrastructure and hosting charges, but those are the only fees that you are required to bear.

We are presently evaluating OpenStack.

CloudStack is faster than OpenStack. The OpenStack solution takes years and years to build your services, whereas CloudStack allows for much faster deployment.

I do not think that we are switching to OpenStack because it is a more complex product.

Another option would be Kubernetes with Mirantis or any other product suite, but we have not evaluated this.

My advice for anybody interested in implementing this product is to do the POC, and don't just go blindly with it. You need to see what the pitfalls are and whether your team can handle it, or not. If they cannot handle it then you should look at other cloud products, such as those that have more support in the community. 

On the other hand, if you are looking for something small, scalable, and easy to deploy, then this is a good solution.

I would rate this product a seven and a half out of ten.

My company has developed solutions like user-friendly control portals and billing portals for CloudStack. Also we were providing infrastructure support for CloudStack-based IaaS platforms for a few of our clients. We used most possible cases like LDAP integrations, RBAC, etc., with CloudStack. We created multi-zone infrastructure with CloudStack and it was working great.

We acquired some good clients for our billing and control portal solutions with CloudStack and it improved our business greatly. 

Multiple types of hypervisor support, multi-zone support, and VPC are great valuable features, in my opinion. Also, there are shared network features - LB, VPN, etc. - which are very useful for every user.

For time consuming operations like storage migrations, volume Snapshot restore and the like, we faced issues like MySQL operations timing out and status update failures. Those areas needs improvement.

I encountered some stability issues. When I tried to remove high-capacity virtual machines it took a long time to update, and sometimes the VM status failed to update properly in the cloud database. This occurred multiple times, even though I had sufficient resources. Other than that everything was fine.

No, I did not face any issues scalability issues.

Since it is an open-source product, we did not approach any technical support specifically. But the CloudStack forums and ShapeBlue forums are very helpful for many of the issues we faced. Sometimes we got exact solutions from the forums.

Straightforward, a very simple process.

It's an open-source product, so there won't be any pricing. For licensing, it uses Apache open-source license.

I rate it at five out of 10. For a private cloud, CloudStack is good and fine, but for public cloud, it will not be that a great experience, in my opinion. CloudStack is good for private cloud, simple to install and set up.

If you are planning for a public cloud with microservices architecture, go for OpenStack. CloudStack is a monolithic architecutred solution to manage cloud  infra and sometimes it will be difficult to pick and fix a single component from CloudStack.

We use the solution as a private cloud on-premises. It is for central storage.

It's for business purposes. 

We like the virtualization capabilities. It is very effective. 

It's helpful to have it available on the cloud and useful for managed customers.

It is open-source.  

The product supports Kubernetes technologies. 

It supports multiple types of storage. It's a nice environment. It's easy to manage.

We can manage resources like CPU, RAM, and storage. We can limit users and manage them a little bit. 

It is stable.

The product is scalable and easy to manage. 

The IM policy needs to be better.

It is not fully cloud-supported technology. There are some limitations. For example, compared to OpenStack, it doesn't have load balancing. There are different types of instances. We'd like more features to become available. It's not as robust as a public cloud like AWS or Azure. As an open-source cloud option, it can be a bit limited. 

The policies need improvement. It's limited. We can manage user policy only a little. 

Companies need to be knowledgeable about cloud technology. It's not for novice users. 

There are no network traffic monitoring tools. There's no visibility into that right now. 

It's not easy to implement.

We've used the solution for about a year. 

The solution is stable. We haven't faced any issues with the solution. The performance is very good. 

The solution is scalable. It's also easy to manage. However, if a company is not familiar with cloud technology, it would have trouble.

We have used a different solution in the past.

We tend to use a lot of automation technology that is open-source. 

The initial setup is difficult. You need to set up the cloud and the networking. We have to manage the VPC (the Virtual Private Cloud), meaning we have to manage the cloud directly. That's fine. However, the technology itself needs to be improved. We need to manage the policies and set everything up. There is a lot of time needed to deploy the product.

We deployed the solution in-house. We did not need help from a vendor. 

The solution is open-source and free to use. 

I'm an end-user.

I'd recommend the solution; however, it depends on the needs of the company as there are some limitations. 

I would rate the solution seven out of ten.

We have created a zone-based setup in Cloudstack where each zone represents a physical datacentre. Each zone has a few servers/hypervisors with predefined VM templates.

We have a portal where a user just clicks a few times and gets a VM ready for use. We use API in the background, which gives instructions to Cloudstack to produce the desired results.

Cloud computing has improved the way our organization functions. With virtualization, physical hardware has been replaced with virtual devices hosted on CloudStack. What CloudStack does is make the management of servers and VMs easy and centralized.

Also it has become easy to deploy new devices with no or minimal hardware changes. Now, a user can be ready to use a firewall within a few minutes, as compared to the traditional physical model which involved purchase, shipping, hardware configuration, cabling, power, etc.

We use CloudStack because it is simpler than OpenStack and has most features required to be an IaaS orchestration tool.

• CloudStack, by default, gives us a zone-based setup which makes it easier to manage datacenters located in different geographical areas.
• It gives us the ability to manage and segregate a guest network with openvSwitch and VLAN IDs.
• While OpenStack has different components and related DB and conf files, which is difficult to manage, CloudStack has just one database and few related conf files located in a single directory.
• Most logs are generated at a single location, which makes troubleshooting easier.

This product needs a lot improvement on the development side. Every new version introduces new bugs. It lacks many features needed for NFV like DPDK, SR-IOV support, etc.

Also, it is not widely used so Google does not help very much when you are troubleshooting, and the CloudStack forum is not very active.

Yes, we encountered stability issues. We were using an older version on which, when we restarted the CloudStack management service, the connection would break between CloudStack and KVM hosts. This resulted in VM deployment failure. The issue was resolved after updating to the new version.

No issue with scalability.

We don’t have CloudStack support. We manage it on our own.

We were using VMware and Xen earlier, but to reduce the cost and to make management simple, everything has been moved to KVM and CloudStack. Both KVM and CloudStack are free.

We are not using the licensed version.

I rate it a seven out of 10 because it is has most features you would expect from an orchestration tool, but less complexity.

CloudStack is an open-source platform for deploying infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Our company uses it to offer IaaS to companies who want to have public, private, or hybrid cloud.

I implemented this platform in two companies in Colombia. It was used to offer our customers a portal where they could create servers easily, safely, and have stable performance. I worked with different hypervisors and installed CloudStack in different operating systems. The integration is excellent. We had three zones in the platform for specific countries, approximately four pods and 10 clusters with VMware and XenServer hosts, and more than 500 virtual machines in production.

Customers were very happy with how easy it is to create a VPN site-to-site or a NAT, deploy a new virtual machine from a template, take a Snapshot, or clone a VM.

• CloudStack supports every operating system that supports hypervisors, which makes the product more attractive, compared to vCloud Director or Azure.
• It is very easy to install and manage.
• It has the all modules in one node, unlike other software (OpenStack).
• The product allows a customized look and feel, and the ability to add custom workflows.

The product has evolved a lot since the first versions in which it was very complicated to do version updates, and had various problems.

No problem, the platform is very stable.

The platform has some problems, but this is due to restrictions of the hypervisor. For example, it's not possible to augment the disk core in VMware or reduce vCPU with the VM running.

We had support with Citrix and Shapeblue. Currently we only use the CloudStack community.

The initial setup was easy with the support of a partner.

I recommend that you initially consider what solution or cloud product you require. Then, if you are looking for a stable product that is easy to install with a lot of documentation, a portal that is very easy to understand and manage and that can be modified, you should use CloudStack.

The account concept and usage database made billing integration straight forward. The API with CloudStack made integration into various external facing web applications simple enough. In my experience, customers appreciated the console proxy for initial set up and emergency situations.

We made money off of it. For our customers, it enabled them to spend a lot less money when compared to a full-blown infrastructure implementation, without drudging through the complexity of AWS.

• CloudStack is simple to stand up and get off the ground in a hurry.
• Its centralized design allows for easier troubleshooting when compared to OpenStack.
• Out of the box, it’s very well suited for white labeling and IaaS.
• The back-end database design is simple and straight forward.
• The user interface is designed with external users in mind.
• Billing is relatively straightforward with this product.
• Not being restricted to just one hypervisor was nice.

With all that simplicity come limitations that need to be understood and planned for:

• Accounts, domains, and user accounts are set up with public cloud in mind, not private.
• The numerous, multi-layered drill-down menus make it difficult to find one simple knob to turn. It’s still easier to use than the competition but it used to be even simpler, in older versions of CloudStack.
• Cloud routers have always been lacking. They’re fine for public cloud applications but again, for private enterprise use cases, object-based firewalls are pretty important for large, complex set ups. If that sounds like too much of a lift, a description field would be a good Band-aid.

I’ve used, managed, and integrated it for about seven years in three different mid-sized companies. I started using CloudStack before Citrix acquired Cloud.com.