CloudStack Reviews

Compared to other cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure, CloudStack is an open-source cloud computing platform similar to OpenStack. The platform is primarily developed in Java, with its master and client services being open-source as well. This sets it apart from its competitors in the cloud computing market.

When compared to OpenStack, CloudStack is also an open-source platform that is continuously improving its features and capabilities with each new version release. Having worked with CloudStack 4.7, 4.14, and most recently, 4.17, I have noticed significant enhancements in the platform's features and customer experience, such as the introduction of a new user interface in the latest release. Notably, the latest versions have made major improvements to VM live migrations, making them more efficient and effective.

The number of contributors to this solution is relatively small compared to other solutions. However, if more frequent users of CloudStack contribute to the open-source community, it will significantly enhance the overall community experience and make it more useful for everyone involved.

There is room for improvement when it comes to maintenance options in CloudStack, particularly with regard to rolling maintenance for multiple Hypervisors. CloudStack does offer this option, but it has not always worked as expected. However, I believe that this largely depends on our expectations for the solution and how we want it to work. As an example, CloudStack maintains a list of Hypervisors where we can host our virtual machines, and we may need to update these Hypervisors on a regular basis, such as every month or every two weeks. Instead of having to perform manual updates, it would be helpful if there were options to automatically perform live migration and update the Hypervisors properly. While there are improvements being made in this area, I believe that there is still some work to be done. Ultimately, the effectiveness of these maintenance options depends on our specific requirements and how we expect the solution to function.

I have been using CloudStack for approximately three years.

While working with CloudStack, we have encountered several bugs, which we are addressing through collaboration and finding workarounds. However, we have observed that each new release is an improvement over the previous versions, even though it may not be considered entirely stable. Since new releases are made every six months, new bugs are likely to be discovered. While the platform is continuously improving, it may still be prone to instability due to ongoing development and changes.

I rate the stability of CloudStack a six out of ten.

The solution is scalable.

My team is using the solution in my company and our clients.

CloudStack is an open-source community that follows specific procedures for raising and addressing issues. However, there is no dedicated support team available since it is an open-source platform. If you encounter any issues or bugs, you can raise them by submitting a PR with detailed instructions on how to replicate the problem. The community members will then review and address the issue, as this is the standard process for addressing problems within an open-source community.

The setup of CloudStack is difficult. The time required for deploying CloudStack depends on the scale of the environment. For small-scale deployments, it may take a day at most to deploy the applications, assuming prior experience in deploying such applications. If you are an experienced person, you may be able to do it even faster. If the environment is well-prepared, with physical servers, networking setup, and other necessary equipment already in place, the deployment time for CloudStack services can be reduced to half a day. Mr. Arun suggests that the deployment time can vary depending on the level of expertise and the readiness of the environment.

The solution is open-source and free.

If you are considering implementing CloudStack, there are a few questions that you should ask yourself. What are your requirements? Is it for your internal use or are you planning to offer services to end customers? The answers to these questions will depend on the size of your implementation. If you are planning to use CloudStack for your own internal environment with a small number of users, but want to manage those users within the CloudStack environment, then it could be a good fit. However, if you are planning for a larger-scale implementation with the potential to scale to a significant number of users over time, then it would be wise to consider other options as well.

I rate CloudStack a seen out of ten.

The primary advantage of using CloudStack is its open-source nature. Once you have a solid understanding of the underlying technologies and how the platform operates, it is relatively straightforward to deploy and maintain your own infrastructure, whether it is for your internal team or company. In most cases, you can handle maintenance on your own, unless you require significant changes to the solutions' functionality, which may necessitate dependence on the community or the involvement of Java developers to maintain your infrastructure.

My company is a consultancy service and we design, deploy, and support Apache CloudStack for companies worldwide. CloudStack is generally used as a cloud management solution for public clouds, where it is used as a type of bridge for telecom companies and cloud service providers. This is the most common use case around the world, but we also see a lot of use cases for universities as well private cloud environments that are situated on-premises.

Our typical process when using CloudStack starts with designing the cloud, which includes the infrastructure and everything that the customer needs to provide such as the servers, networking, and storage. Once the design is completed, our team then deploys and installs CloudStack, after which we handle the support and training of the customer's employees.

CloudStack is suitable for companies of all sizes, ranging across small, medium, and large. Some companies use it globally, whereas others may use it with a local cloud provider. 

Compared to other open source technology, CloudStack is very easy to deploy and use day-to-day. Because it's so simple, it's oftentimes cheaper to maintain than its competitors. Not only that, but it's also fast and extremely stable.

For example, if you wanted to use OpenStack, you would likely need to get one of the big companies like Red Hat or Canonical to help you implement it, whereas with CloudStack, the packages are provided direct from the community.

I have been impressed by CloudStack's most recent updates around Kubernetes. In particular, they have worked with Kubernetes to support the Cluster API, and you can now easily integrate Kubernetes into CloudStack and get access to a lot of good features. For example, CloudStack can support different hypervisors in the same infrastructure at the same time, such as when using KVM and VMware engine server simultaneously through your workload in the cloud.

We are currently working around the critical points in CloudStack in order to simplify the process, and before the newest versions, CloudStack needed to reload each Virtual Router for each tenant on top of CloudStack. Now, however, they have improved this process by ensuring zero downtime when building the Virtual Router. For a critical environment, this is a nice feature because you don't have to experience any downtime as before.

We recognize that CloudStack is an easy-to-use cloud management platform and, in my opinion, there have been a lot of improvements in the past few years, particular when it comes to the modern UI and overall ease of management. However, I believe that CloudStack needs to grow their marketing in the commercial side. They don't have a great piece of market share right now.

For now, we have two versions per year, one being the LTS (Long Term Support) version, and the other is just for development. It's a very good platform for us at the moment, but one feature I would like to see is CloudStack for edge zones. This would enable us to use it for cloud edge computing, as well as enable search providers to use it to provide cloud service in edge zones, for example. 

I have been working with CloudStack for about nine years now.

CloudStack is a production-rated product and it is very stable. As for maintenance, the LTS version from the community requires periodic updates that sometimes require a company with expertise to help in order to reduce your risks. 

There is also support from the community, although you are not always guaranteed a timely response. That's mainly where my company steps in to help, as we are able to help customers update, improve, and expand their cloud infrastructure as necessary.

Scaling CloudStack is really easy. You just need to add more servers to your CloudStack deployment and it will be available to the customer. There are also mechanisms for using Kubernetes with CloudStack, and other features to help the customer scale easier.

On the whole, you can see everything from small, medium, to large business using CloudStack, sometimes globally but also with local cloud providers. 

It's very easy to get support for CloudStack because there's a large community available to give you help. Not just that, but my company is also dedicated to supporting users from the community as well. Of course, when you are a customer of ours, you also get access to a strict SLA for support.

Positive

At my previous company I used OpenStack, which was around the year 2010. Both these solutions cover the same proposal for cloud computing in that they create virtual machines, segregate them, and provide storage as a service, and so on. The main difference lies in the complexity. For example, using OpenStack, you need a lot of technical staff specialized in OpenStack specifically in order to manage it. With CloudStack, on the other hand, you can simply use your on-site staff who are already working on the infrastructure.

The setup for CloudStack is a really easy process, compared with other solutions. For example, in only one day you can have an operational cloud running in your infrastructure. This is where you see a big difference when you compare CloudStack with OpenStack. With OpenStack, you have a lot of models to contend with, making it complex to deploy and configure, whereas with CloudStack it's easy because you only require one package that provides everything you need.

When a client of ours wants to deploy something with CloudStack, depending on the size of the project, we usually involve a professional from our architecture team to gather the requirements and design the new cloud infrastructure.

One interesting case is the University of São Paulo in Brazil. They have a large cloud managed by CloudStack comprising about 500 bare-metal servers using VMware and XenServer. To manage and maintain all this infrastructure in their two data centers, they use 5 infrastructure team members, these are just infrastructure specialists.

CloudStack is an open source solution, so you don't need to pay anything for it. When our company develops something specially for CloudStack, it is donated to the Apache Software Foundation and provided to anyone that wants to use it.

I can recommend CloudStack because there are a lot of large companies using it in production for critical mission systems, and everything else. It's a very stable product, and compared to similar solutions it is also easier to deploy.

Then there's the fact that you don't need a license, so it's obviously cheaper than most alternatives. If you seek out a company such as a consultant service to help you build the infrastructure, service cloud, orchestrator, etc., then you will find that CloudStack doesn't take much time to implement. The other solutions are a different story, and they may take up to three or four times longer to deploy. CloudStack is very intentional about keeping things simple.

One final point is that with CloudStack, you don't have the vendor lock-in that you might have with OpenStack. If you're using CloudStack and you obtain support from one company and then decide to go with another company for support, it's all the same base code. Contrast this with OpenStack, where if you have Canonical OpenStack running in your infrastructure, you will have vendor lock-in because it's not that easy to move over to Red Hat OpenStack.

I would rate Apache CloudStack a ten out of ten.

In our environment, we had two setups and ran instances in managing instances across both.

CloudStack improved productivity, and our primary usage was for a test installation to develop the Cluster API Provider for CloudStack.

We were pretty happy with the affinity group feature, which worked well. Another feature I liked was the ability to use your own database to source from non-Amazon web services.

I liked the separation of the isolated network versus the shared network. Although it took a while to grasp, it turned out to be a good way to manage our infrastructure. Tagging also helped with managing resources.

In general, the VM’s life cycle was thought out really well. It captured different states and allowed us to manage the virtual machines through an API easily.

The area of improvement could be the regionalization aspect. For example, managing multiple regions or CloudStack deployments together was not thought out thoroughly in the versions I used. We faced issues around managing the global infrastructure and had to develop around it.

I was using CloudStack at my old company, where I used it for about a year. I used versions 4.14 and 4.16, and 4.17.

There were a couple of times when we had to restart the management servers as it was unable to bring up the virtual machines. There were challenges with the nested virtualization.

I rate it a seven out of ten. The globalization part makes it difficult for us to scale.

There were different ways to set up: scalable and non-scalable way.

We had the whole thing running on top of Amazon Web Services, which added another layer of complexity because it had nested virtualization at that point. You are running VMs on a VM. It did not seem trivial to set up; it was definitely a challenge for us.

It is open source. We did not have to pay for any additional features.

Tagging is key if you want to manage more than a couple of resources.

I would rate Cloudstack an eight out of ten.

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 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.

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 are developing a software for data centers to ease the process of storage hardware maintenance and providing services.

We needed a framework which supported the basics of our requirements. CloudStack's framework was our first choice.

As our primary focus was on OS development, CloudStack helped us showcase our features through process visualization and functional solutions.

The integration and MVC architecture build are awesome. The structuring of the components and isolated environments helped us when using parts of the framework at different levels of product development.

A technology upgrade is one item which could be improved upon a lot.

Though the framework is best in its own way, a technology upgrade is lagging.

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.