CloudStack Reviews

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.

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.

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.

Legacy support for a previous CloudStack environment.

It works, and pretty much always has. Reliability and support for enterprise features, with a multi-tenant interface, makes CloudStack a very compelling solution.

• Stability
• Centralized management design that scales well
• Transparent interoperability with different hypervisors and manufacturers

We also have OpenStack in production, but many of our staff members prefer CloudStack for the reasons mentioned above (less complexity, less failure-prone). There are reasons we use both though – different workloads on different systems.

Lack of support for third-party software vendors such as Veeam and Zerto creates limitations on comprehensive offerings which would include backup and disaster recovery.

We had some issues with XenServer an OVS, but that wasn’t really a CloudStack problem.

No scalability issues. CloudStack has actually scaled quite well for our needs.  Even though it’s more monolithic in design compared to OpenStack, we have had no issues scaling, and it actually scales with far less complexity as a result.

Community support is very good, but after Citrix divested CloudPlatform to Accelerite, commercial support was absolutely atrocious. We actually investigated third parties like ShapeBlue because the support from Accelerite was so bad and made the decision to part ways with Accelerite completely when our contract was up for renewal.

Complex, but all clouds are complex so that is to be expected. I and one other community member actually write a bunch of documentation for first-timers to help them through the process, because the networking always threw everybody.

Obviously OSS is free, so you can’t beat that when it comes to price. For the commercial support options, they are extremely fair for quality of the solution.

Yes, we evaluated other solutions, and we run CloudStack along with OpenStack in two different environments for different reasons. In general, my preference is for CloudStack because it is less complex, has fewer moving parts and has demonstrated better stability for our needs.

I have used it for close to eight years, since Cloud.com, prior to the Citrix acquisition.

Get commercial assistance from an experienced consultant who has deployed it before. Choices made early on in a cloud deployment can lock you into a design that may be undesirable in the future, but near impossible to change if implemented incorrectly early on.

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.

The account concept and usage database made billing integration straight forward. The API with CloudStack made integration into various external facing web applications simple enough. In my experience, customers appreciated the console proxy for initial set up and emergency situations.

We made money off of it. For our customers, it enabled them to spend a lot less money when compared to a full-blown infrastructure implementation, without drudging through the complexity of AWS.

• CloudStack is simple to stand up and get off the ground in a hurry.
• Its centralized design allows for easier troubleshooting when compared to OpenStack.
• Out of the box, it’s very well suited for white labeling and IaaS.
• The back-end database design is simple and straight forward.
• The user interface is designed with external users in mind.
• Billing is relatively straightforward with this product.
• Not being restricted to just one hypervisor was nice.

With all that simplicity come limitations that need to be understood and planned for:

• Accounts, domains, and user accounts are set up with public cloud in mind, not private.
• The numerous, multi-layered drill-down menus make it difficult to find one simple knob to turn. It’s still easier to use than the competition but it used to be even simpler, in older versions of CloudStack.
• Cloud routers have always been lacking. They’re fine for public cloud applications but again, for private enterprise use cases, object-based firewalls are pretty important for large, complex set ups. If that sounds like too much of a lift, a description field would be a good Band-aid.

I’ve used, managed, and integrated it for about seven years in three different mid-sized companies. I started using CloudStack before Citrix acquired Cloud.com.

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.