CloudStack is

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over m ...

software for creating, managing, and deploying infrastructure cloud services. It uses existing

hypervisor A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called ...

platforms for virtualization, such as KVM,

VMware vSphere VMware vSphere (formerly VMware Infrastructure 4) is VMware's cloud computing virtualization platform. It includes an updated vCenter Configuration Manager, as well as vCenter Application Discovery Manager, and the ability of vMotion to move ...

, including

ESXi VMware ESXi (formerly ESX) is an enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware for deploying and serving virtual computers. As a type-1 hypervisor, ESXi is not a software application that is installed on an operating system (OS); ...

and

vCenter vCenter Server is the centralized management utility for VMware, and is used to manage virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer archit ...

, and XenServer/XCP. In addition to its own API, CloudStack also supports the

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...

(AWS) API and the

Open Cloud Computing Interface The Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) is a set of specifications delivered through the Open Grid Forum, for cloud computing service providers. OCCI has a set of implementations that act as proofs of concept. It builds upon World Wide Web fund ...

from the

Open Grid Forum The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors for standardization of grid computing. It was formed in 2006 in a merger of the Global Grid Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance. The OGF models its process on the In ...

History

CloudStack was originally developed by Cloud.com, formerly known as VMOps. VMOps was founded by

Sheng Liang Sheng Liang is the CEO and Co-Founder of Rancher Labs. Previously he was the lead developer on the original Java virtual machine (JVM) team at Sun Microsystems, Inc., and the chief technology officer of the Cloud Platforms groups at Citrix Syst ...

, Shannon Williams,

Alex Huang Alex Huang is an American software engineer and was the co-founder of Cloud.com and software architect for CloudStack. He is currently the senior principal engineer with the Cloud Platforms groups at Citrix Systems after their acquisition of Cloud ...

, Will Chan, and Chiradeep Vittal in 2008. The company raised a total of $17.6M in venture funding from

Redpoint Ventures Redpoint Ventures is an American venture capital firm focused on investments in seed, early and growth-stage companies. History The firm was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, with offices in San Francisco, Los Angel ...

, Nexus Ventures and

Index Ventures Index Ventures is a Europe, European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, investing in technology-enabled companies with a focus on e-commerce, fintech, mobility, gaming, infrastructure/AI, and security. Sinc ...

(Redpoint and Nexus led the initial Series A funding round). The company changed its name from VMOps to Cloud.com on May 4, 2010, when it emerged from

stealth mode In business, stealth mode is a company's temporary state of secretiveness, usually undertaken to avoid alerting competitors to a pending product launch or another business initiative. When an entire company is in stealth mode it may attempt to ...

by announcing its product. Cloud.com was based in

Cupertino Cupertino ( ) is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, directly west of San Jose on the western edge of the Santa Clara Valley with portions extending into the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The population was 57,8 ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...

. In May 2010, Cloud.com released most of CloudStack as

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

, version 3 (GPLv3). They kept about 5% proprietary. Cloud.com and Citrix both supported

OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software platfo ...

, another Apache-licensed cloud computing program, at its announcement in July 2010. In October 2010, Cloud.com announced a partnership with

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

to develop the code to provide integration and support of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V to the OpenStack project.

Citrix Systems Citrix Systems, Inc. is an American multinational cloud computing and virtualization technology company that provides server, application and desktop virtualization, networking, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing technologies. ...

purchased Cloud.com on July 12, 2011, for approximately $200 million. In August 2011, Citrix released the remaining code under the Apache Software License with further development governed by the

Apache Foundation The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the Ap ...

. In February 2012, Citrix released CloudStack 3.0. Among other features, this added support for

Swift Swift or SWIFT most commonly refers to: * SWIFT, an international organization facilitating transactions between banks ** SWIFT code * Swift (programming language) * Swift (bird), a family of birds It may also refer to: Organizations * SWIFT ...

, OpenStack's S3-like object storage solution. In April 2012, Citrix donated CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), where it was accepted into the

Apache Incubator Apache Incubator is the gateway for open-source projects intended to become fully fledged Apache Software Foundation projects. The Incubator project was created in October 2002 to provide an entry path to the Apache Software Foundation for proj ...

; Citrix changed the license to the Apache License version 2. As part of this change, Citrix also ceased their involvement in

. On November 6, 2012, CloudStack 4.0.0-incubating was announced, the first stable release after joining ASF. On March 20, 2013, CloudStack graduated from Apache Incubator and became a Top-Level Project (TLP) of ASF. The first stable (maintenance) release after graduation is CloudStack 4.0.2.

Key features

*Built-in high-availability for hosts and VMs *AJAX web GUI for management *AWS API compatibility *Hypervisor agnostic *Snapshot management *Usage metering *Network management (VLAN's, security groups) *Virtual routers, firewalls, load balancers *Multi-role support

Supported Hypervisors

BareMetal hosts

* RHEL or CentOS, v7.x * Ubuntu 16.04

Deployment architecture

The minimum production installation consists of one machine running the CloudStack Management Server and another machine to act as the cloud infrastructure (in this case, a very simple infrastructure consisting of one host running hypervisor software). In its smallest deployment, a single machine can act as both the Management Server and the hypervisor host (using the KVM hypervisor). Multiple management servers can be configured for redundancy and load balancing, all pointing to a common

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

database.

Users

In July 2012 it was reported that

Datapipe Datapipe was a provider of managed hosting services and data centers for information technology services and cloud computing with data centers in Somerset, New Jersey, San Jose, California, the United Kingdom, and China. The company was founded i ...

launched the largest international public cloud to be built on CloudStack, which included 6 data centers in the US, Britain, and Asia.

References

External links

* {{Apache Software Foundation CloudStack Cloud platforms Cloud infrastructure Free software programmed in Java (programming language) Virtualization software for Linux Free software for cloud computing
Cloud Management Portal built on Apache Cloudstack