A Reliable and Scalable Cloud Computing Platform

Apache CloudStack is yet another outstanding project that has contributed many tools and projects to the open source community. The author has selected the relevant and important extracts from the excellent documentation provided by the Apache CloudStack

Apache CloudStack is one among the highly visible projects from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The project focuses on deploying open source software for public and private Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds. Listed below are a few important points about CloudStack.

It is designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as highly available and scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platforms.

CloudStack is used by a number of service providers to offer public cloud services and by many companies to provide on-premises (private) cloud offerings or as part of a hybrid cloud solution.

CloudStack includes the entire ‘stack’ of features that most organisations desire with an IaaS cloud -- compute orchestration, Network as a Service, user and account management, a full and open native API, resource accounting, and a first-class user interface (UI).

It currently supports the most popular hypervisors — VMware, KVM, Citrix XenServer, Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), Oracle VM server and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Users can manage their cloud with an easy-to-use Web interface, command line tools and/or a full-featured RESTful API. In addition, CloudStack provides an API that’s compatible with AWS EC2 and S3 for organisations that wish to deploy hybrid clouds.

It provides an open and flexible cloud orchestration platform to deliver reliable and scalable private and public clouds.

Features and functionality

Some of the features and functionality provided by CloudStack are:

Works with hosts running XenServer/XCP, KVM, Hyper-V, and/or VMware ESXi with vSphere