CloudStack Reviews

I used Apache CloudStack as an academic project, for setting up the environments for a school's infrastructure, and not for specific applications' usage.

My experience with CloudStack was part of my academic experience in my college. It eventually did not end up being used practically, it was showcased as a research project.

I think CloudStack needs to promote itself better, since I believe it a better solution than OpenStack. However, the latter has been more successfully commercially.

I have also explored setting up with OpenStack and I found it harder to use than CloudStack.

I would rate Apache CloudStack at seven out of 10, compared with six out of 10 for OpenStack. 

Easy installation and simple IAAS cloud management.

The product has been evolving over the years. Several new features like LDAP integration, quota management, and RBAC have been added over last few years.

The upgrade process can be improved further. There are two parts to the upgrade. One is to upgrade the CloudStack management server. That is desirable in terms of auto updates and more user friendly UI to manage updates. Then there is this whole system VM template upgrade procedure that sounds technical, although it has been improving over the years with more automation and mirror selection that could be more desirable.

We have been using this solution for four years.

The product is stable. There were times where longer running operation could run into issues. Some of these stability related problems have been fixed in newer releases.

With the scale that we operate, I have not encountered issues with scalability. CloudStack manages infrastructure with 2-4 thousands of hosts easily.

The community is active and the response to questions is reasonably quick. There are also several companies providing support for CloudStack.

We have been on CloudStack since the start.

The initial setup was simple compared to competitive products.

It is an open source product and comes free under license from the Apache foundation. If you need dedicated support or training, then you may have to pay. It depends on how you go about it.

We have looked at OpenStack. At that time, it appeared to have been receiving more traction. But we found installation and operation more complex, compared to the simplicity of CloudStack. CloudStack installation is simple and it works.

If you are looking for a private cloud, just go for CloudStack.

The most valuable features are:

• Compatibility with various hypervisors such as Xen, KVM, vSphere, and Hyper-V.
• Support for multiple availability zones.
• Structured REST API and integration with virtual appliance vendors solutions.

CloudStack has reduced the time to market for the delivery of new products.

Factors that need improvement are:

• Visualization in terms of the resources usage.
• The user interface.
• Providing best error feedback to the users.

I've used CloudStack for three years for the private cloud environments.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

The main support for this platform is the community of developments and the users involved with this open-source project.

It is my first solution to manage the on-premise environments.

The initial setup is actually pretty easy because CloudStack has a monolithic, all-in-one architecture.

We looked at OpenStack and VMware.

Reduction in the time for the presentation of new improvements.

We use Apache CloudStack to host and orchestrate all of our virtual environments. We host both internal virtual machines and customer virtual machines.

It allowed us to build and manage a virtual environment much larger than we originally thought would be possible for our organization. It also gives us the ability to rapidly deploy virtual resources to meet business needs quickly.

The product gives us the ability to orchestrate large virtual environments and is flexible enough to allow us to configure it for what we need. We value the flexibility of the networking feature set as well as the ability to build virtual private clouds.

The area of Apache CloudStack that could stand the most improvement is the functionality/features around the virtual routers. They can be somewhat cumbersome to deal with at times and are the least stable piece of the product.

I would rate this an eight out of 10. It is a great solution for virtual hypervisor orchestration. It is purpose-built for our environment and does very well if you have the time to manage your environment.

We’ve been using some form of CloudStack in our environment since 2012. It has become an integral part of how we provide critical services to our customers.

We are an ISP in Brazil. We have started to offer IaaS to the market and our current customers. We implemented ACS in our datacenter starting with a zone, pod, and cluster. We also developed an eCommerce/user interface at the top of the Apache CloudStack platform.

We increased our IaaS sales by 30% and our deploy time of VM/instances has been reduced from one day to one minute. We also had a relevant reduction of bureaucracy tasks.

• CloudStack is very stable and scalable. 
• It uses a single code/project differently from other platforms, like OpenStack.
• It is very simple to implement and maintain.

The absence of the feature, deploy an instance from a snapshot, is the weak point of the platform. It is a feature that everyone needs nowadays.

We had only one problem with the hypervisors, but not with the ACS.

No issues. The platform is very simple to scale-out.

We use only the community, as we have inside technical skills, and it works very well.

We did not use a previous solution.

It is not complex, but has some little tricks.

We contracted a specialized company called ShapeBlue for the first design of the environment, then we deployed it ourselves.

The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase.

Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer.

We evaluated OpenStack and Eucalyptus. 

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.

Development and test environment for customer.

We saved on cost of hardware.

You can build your own cloud and make it customizable with APIs.

The zones need to be more stable. During moving and first deployment there were a lot of issues.