CloudStack Reviews

We are using CloudStack for various purposes, including private cloud setups and setting up public clouds for our customers. We utilize it for any kind of orchestration and cloud orchestration. CloudStack is one of our go-to products.

Everything in CloudStack works effectively. It handles compute, disk, virtual networking, and Kubernetes services. We integrate other providers such as Cloudian and MinIO for object storage, making it a comprehensive cloud solution.

The initial implementation process was quite good.

The product had some limitations. So, I decided to write my own stack from scratch. The product does not have an easily implementable payment gateway. It must provide a payment gateway hook in future releases.

As a shared hosting provider, we offer VPS services and rely on CloudStack as our core orchestrator for our infrastructure. We operate it on our own hardware and through an on-premises cloud. CloudStack allows us to virtualize and distribute our physical capacity across our various services.

When people ask us why we use CloudStack over other options, it's not just one single feature that stands out. Over the years, we have valued CloudStack for its ease of use.

Many other open-source projects are backed by commercial companies, which can change their commercial alignments or goals quickly. Even though they offer open-source software, you may still have to align with their commercial targets. And this is where CloudStack becomes a totally different solution. Basically, it provides a more reliable and stable piece of infrastructure code. This has been our experience over the last 12 years of using CloudStack.

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.

We had our own AWS instance providing virtual machines. It works quite well with balancers. Around 30 engineers at my company use it.

My company could implement a lot of customizations and integration with load balancers and DNS. When we started using CloudStack, we didn't have that integration, so we developed that. We could fix anything missing in the solution. 

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.

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.