CloudStack Reviews

We are working as SRE, so you can consider us as an admin or consultant role because we are the ones who manage the complete cloud infrastructure. Let me introduce myself; I'm Tarun, and I'm working at Infosys, an Indian-based company. I have a total experience of 10.5 years in the IT industry, and I have worked on multiple tools such as ITSM tools, ServiceNow, BMC Remedy, and also got a chance to work on Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus, and other monitoring tools.  I work at Infosys, managing their own cloud technology, a recently developed cloud platform.

We are responsible for managing the complete infrastructure using the CloudStack platform. Our basic day-to-day activities include managing users, dealing with VM creation issues, and checking hypervisors when users encounter problems. We have various regions, including Reno, Mesa, and Maiden, where our servers run. If there is an issue with a particular hypervisor, we receive tickets from users, check the services on the hypervisor, and troubleshoot accordingly.

We also perform patching activities during weekends, including DB patching, which requires us to drain hypervisors and take downtime for management servers. Alongside these activities, we monitor everything using Grafana, which offers dashboards and alerts for issues such as service disruptions or resource utilization increases.

The features or capabilities of CloudStack that I have found most valuable include the scaling and load balancer functionalities, which are very useful as they automatically assign VMs to the appropriate host based on current CPU or memory usage. Another great feature is its ease of use, requiring no prior cloud knowledge, making it straightforward to set up the management server along with zones, pods, and clusters. Additionally, the VM migration feature is exceptional, allowing us to drain VMs to other hypervisors efficiently if a host goes down, ensuring business continuity.

CloudStack has greatly helped integrate our existing infrastructure because we manage a massive cloud platform with thousands of VMs and around 1,200 to 1,500 hypervisors. We are planning to expand to over 5,000 hosts. Given this extensive landscape, we appreciate how smoothly CloudStack handles operations without disrupting business. We maintain four management servers along with the hypervisors, distributing them across various locations such as Maiden, Reno, and Mesa, allowing us to manage our vast VM landscape effectively.

I believe enhancements could be made in CloudStack, particularly in the management servers. I had the opportunity to collaborate with one of the Apache CloudStack developers, leading to the installation of additional agents for better information retrieval from hypervisors. We implemented configurations, ensuring consistency across hosts and VMs. We also utilized Ansible or YAML files to automate password upgrades during patching activities and database management, showcasing our customization efforts for improvement.

For future releases, it would be beneficial if Apache enhanced CloudStack by integrating alerting systems directly. We've had instances where hypervisors experienced overloads without prior alerts, so proactive alerts within the tool would better prepare us for addressing issues swiftly, preventing disruption in business operations. A portal summarizing system metrics alongside alert capabilities would greatly enhance our operational efficiency.

I have been working with CloudStack for around two and a half years now.

In terms of stability and reliability, we haven't encountered stability problems with CloudStack unless there are issues with our networking team. We did face a high-priority networking issue once, but even then, CloudStack allowed us to migrate hypervisors and VMs to other zones smoothly, which demonstrates its overall reliability.

CloudStack is highly scalable. Our previous scalability efforts went well, and we are planning to implement further scalability. It's straightforward to add hypervisors to the CloudStack environment, and we manage configurations using Puppet for seamless integration, making it easy to get the services up and running promptly.

I often communicate with CloudStack's technical support and customer service. We have a Slack channel where users raise tickets or issues, and we connect with them directly to resolve problems. We log in, share screens, and troubleshoot issues from CloudStack or via CLI before closing the tickets and informing users about the resolutions.

Positive

I did not participate in the initial setup and deployment of CloudStack. By the time I arrived, the setup was already in place; however, I contributed to upgrading from 1,000 hypervisors to around 5,000, with plans to expand further.

We use CloudStack support for multiple hypervisors. Regarding network management capabilities, I find it a good feature, particularly the network offering that allows for distributing IP addresses within clusters. If a VM is created, it gets an assigned IP address, and network traffic is managed effectively. If there's excessive traffic in one region, it automatically migrates to another. We have monitoring configured, so we're informed beforehand of network issues, giving us time to act and leverage networking capabilities to manage traffic effectively. On a scale of 1-10, I rate CloudStack a 9 out of 10.

We are selling a service based on CloudStack, utilizing it to sell resources, specifically virtual clouds, to our customers.

While it is accurate to say we are not a reseller since CloudStack is an open source product, we are indeed a user of it and are reselling services based on CloudStack.

Right now, we are using CloudStack with the KVM hypervisor, but we also have a couple of VMware clusters and are going to add a Proxmox cluster to our CloudStack as well, utilizing three different hypervisors based on the customer's requirements. We use different classes of hardware so we can offer tailored solutions, whether that means many cores with lower core speed or fewer cores but faster threads for database needs.

The flexibility in CloudStack is one of its best features, and while it's very flexible in how you can configure it, this flexibility can also lead to complex solutions, so you have to be very careful in how you implement your solution because you can do things in many different ways.

The advanced network management capabilities in CloudStack are fairly robust, allowing you to create virtual clouds, set up various types of VPNs, and perform many different networking functions, so it's pretty well-featured in networking.

The user management in CloudStack is very flexible, allowing you to use role-based access control and configure users, accounts, and domains in many different ways, building various structures for users and supporting different authentication methods such as Active Directory and LDAP.

The APIs for automation in CloudStack are excellent; everything is API-driven, and while the API is very rich and hard to learn, you can do everything you would want to do, including everything in the user interface and more. Furthermore, there is a very good CLI called CloudMonkey that utilizes the APIs for scripting processes, making automation very rich.

There is a need for improvement, particularly in the user interface for end users, which is fairly complex. Users require a good understanding of VMs and networking to utilize it effectively, so it might be beneficial to have a simpler interface for deploying a user and a VM while automatically setting up necessary configurations in the background. That said, you can create your own front-end using the APIs.

Our use of CloudStack has been ongoing for about two years.

The installation of CloudStack can be quite challenging because you need a good understanding of the product before starting. While setting up a very simple CloudStack with a few computers is manageable, attempting to configure extensive networking and various classes of computers makes the installation process very complex.

The challenge in installation comes from the complexity that arises due to CloudStack's flexibility; if you're not well-versed in what you're doing, it's easy to implement it incorrectly and end up with a fragile solution, similar to installing complex solutions like VMware, which can also become complicated if not managed properly.

From what we've seen so far, CloudStack appears to be fairly stable, showing no significant limitations.

CloudStack is also very scalable; you can build fairly large clusters without issues, making its scalability a strong point.

I have not worked directly with something similar to CloudStack for the same use case, although we did evaluate other solutions, including OpenStack, before deciding that CloudStack best suited our needs.

The installation of CloudStack can be quite challenging because you need a good understanding of the product before starting.

This solution rates a seven out of ten.

Positive

My usual use cases for CloudStack involve an AWS style private cloud or public cloud. I can deploy an AWS style cloud using the open source tool that is CloudStack. The use case depends on the customer, as we have service providers who are creating public clouds and providing cloud services to the end users. We also have customers who are creating private clouds for in-house deployments. It really depends on your use cases.

The idea of CloudStack is to provide a cloud environment with a self-service portal where users can come and deploy VMs. The underlying technology that CloudStack relies on is hypervisors, and the great thing about CloudStack is that it's hypervisor agnostic. I can integrate any hypervisor, so if I have my own hypervisors and want to implement a self-service on top of it, that's where CloudStack fits in. If I'm starting a cloud business, CloudStack can support that too. Regardless of the hypervisor I currently have or prefer, CloudStack integrates smoothly.

At present, we're seeing lots of traction, as people are eager to shift to open source solutions such as KVM, which is community-based and has substantial support. CloudStack integrates tightly with KVM and has many rich features.

CloudStack is very feature-rich in terms of networking. It can perform numerous functions. With advanced networking, I have different types of networks that I can deploy in CloudStack, such as isolated and shared networks. The goal is to offer end users what they need, allowing them to deploy their own networks as well. It's very flexible and loaded with features. When I say feature-rich, I mean things such as NAT, firewalls, and site-to-site VPNs—all these capabilities are accessible through the advanced networking tools in CloudStack. Until version 4.19, this was managed through a virtual router created when deploying a network. In the latest versions, there's capability for integrating VNF, virtual network function templates, into CloudStack, which allows for the incorporation of other open source firewall software such as pfSense as a network firewall or source NAT provider that I can control individually. Additionally, we support VXLANs to extend networks, and BGPs are now included in the product, allowing dynamic and static routing and all related functionalities.

There are quite a few features of CloudStack that I have found valuable, such as VM deployment and manageability that comes in quite handy. I do a lot of work with VMware and support KVM, and we also do migrations from VMware to KVM. KVM is an open source hypervisor that allows for significant cost savings. We have many customers coming in to do that, and we have successfully migrated quite a few customers as well. That's something that's playing a big role at this point in time because of the circumstances with VMware. Apart from this, CloudStack is a very feature-rich product; it gives you a lot of control over your VM networks and has extensive integration with storage plugins where you can use many open source tools to bring storage into your CloudStack environment for backups or even to run VMs. Recently, there is a new feature coming where you can integrate CloudStack with any hypervisor, which I would say is a game changer. The reason being, with many ongoing changes with hypervisors and numerous options out there, with CloudStack, I can basically bring in whatever I want.

Enhancements for CloudStack can focus on integrating more hypervisors, as mentioned regarding current features. We're working on a new feature that will allow for certain limited functions, but over time, it will improve to achieve full integration with various hypervisors. That's one key area of ongoing development within the community. Additionally, there's notable activity shifting from VMware to KVM. We have successfully migrated a few customers, but some challenges were encountered with complex networks or intricate VMs. The community is addressing these hiccups, and improvements are on the roadmap. Furthermore, there's a GPU functionality feature that is forthcoming, which is an essential improvement and will be included in the next few releases.

Customization freedom already exists because it's a community-driven platform. If I could suggest one improvement, it would be regarding containers. While we currently support the orchestration of container hardware or worker nodes, I want to add the ability to control the containers themselves.

I have been working with CloudStack since 2014, so it has been approximately 11 years now.

I have encountered some challenges during the initial setup or deployment of CloudStack. Having worked all these years, I see that there were initial roadblocks due to the learning curve involved with any product. When users first engage with it, I often find that customers or community members struggle with getting certain elements up and running. When starting CloudStack, there are systems in place that auto-check and indicate whether the cloud is functioning properly. I have observed that some community users face difficulties getting everything running, but most issues resolve with thorough documentation review. As an open-source product, the documentation can sometimes feel overwhelming for new users. However, there's always a community willing to assist.

The primary difficulties I've encountered often involve users missing basic setup steps, such as seeding the required templates before initiating their cloud. Some community members attempt installations on their own Linux distributions, which sometimes leads to complications. The success rate typically hinges on the kernel version they are utilizing and what CloudStack has been tested against. Generally, it works flawlessly with documented versions, but if someone uses a new distribution, they may need to build their own RPMs for installation. Hence, there's a learning curve associated with that as well.

I would describe CloudStack's stability as very high. There are quite a few public and private clouds operating with it, and it remains stable and feature-rich. A lot of community work is ongoing, so if any issues arise, they will be addressed in upcoming releases. The community has become very active, especially in recent years, due to increasing market traction. There are numerous public clouds that continue to function and generate revenue, so it is quite stable.

Regarding scalability, I can confidently say that CloudStack has no limits. It can scale as much as required, and there are no theoretical limits that I or the community have encountered thus far.

I started in the CloudStack community and then was hired by one of the companies that provides support, so I have relevant experience with the technical support and customer service.

Neutral

The initial setup and deployment experience with CloudStack is quite easy. I have the RPMs for all the major Linux distributions, and the packages are built for Ubuntu and Red Hat, though there's no CentOS at present—only Alma or Rocky Linux. One of the reasons CloudStack resonates with the community is its straightforward installation; it's just one package for everything. In contrast, with OpenStack, various modules and integrations take significant effort and time to establish a functioning product. With CloudStack, I simply download the package, run the installer, and that's it—it's done. It's designed to be easy from the outset.

With CloudStack's Role-Based Access Controls, it is pretty handy for user management. The user experience depends on the use case. In private clouds, that's where I observe a lot of utilization of RBAC, as different departments need to control or access CloudStack with specific restrictions. I can define roles and limit what users can do or see and which parts of the cloud product they can manage. Typically, this use case is not as prevalent in public clouds, where everything is governed at the account or tenant level itself. However, RBAC is far more feature-rich when implemented in private clouds.

CloudStack's APIs are very tight and useful for automating processes. They integrate flawlessly with Terraform and Ansible, the market leaders in automation technologies. I can leverage Terraform or Ansible to automate tasks as needed. The API is very feature-rich and operates on a REST-based architecture. Just to clarify, all the UI elements of CloudStack are primarily API-driven; the features I see in the UI represent only about 80% of what's available through the API. There are many more features accessible through the API, and numerous community users rely heavily on it to automate their tasks.

When discussing CloudStack's orchestration capabilities, the primary function is orchestrating the VMs. I can spin up any number of VMs needed using my automation tools or the user-friendly UI. Navigating through the UI is straightforward, making it accessible for anyone starting, as they can easily find what they need on the left pane of their dashboard. The orchestration platform is extensive because it can integrate with any hypervisor I want to bring into the platform.

I rate CloudStack 9 out of 10.

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 product could improve by embracing newer technologies like GPU virtualization.

I have been working with CloudStack for approximately 12 years.

I would rate the stability of CloudStack at nine and a half out of ten. It is very stable.

I would rate the scalability of CloudStack around eight and a half to nine out of ten. It supports scaling well.

The community is very active and prompt. However, there are instances where some issues cannot be immediately solved, but the community eventually addresses them in future patches. I would rate the community support around eight out of ten.

Positive

The main competitor for on-premises setups is OpenStack. We have undertaken projects using OpenStack but found CloudStack to be easier to manage, maintain, and implement. CloudStack requires fewer engineers to set up and maintain compared to OpenStack deployments of similar size.

The setup process is very straightforward.

CloudStack is an open-source product without any inherent costs. Service and support are available through various vendors, with implicit costs related to the engineers needed to maintain it.

I rate CloudStack at eight and a half to nine out of ten. We are not system integrators, and our long-term use of CloudStack indicates that it works well for us. Since it is open-source, we are not tied to any partner program.

The Plugins for the big Cloud operators

Plugins good for hybrid cloud

The initial implementation process was quite good.  M G A    plugins

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.

I used the solution for about three years. I was using the latest version of the product.

The tool has good stability.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight out of ten. It’s quite scalable. I used the solution on an hourly basis.

In 2012, I used Rackspace. It then became OpenStack. I switched to CloudStack because OpenStack had too many plug-ins. It led to too many changes in dependencies, which made it very cumbersome to support.

The solution is cloud-based. The solution can be deployed on public, private, and hybrid clouds. If we get the right documentation, the initial setup is quite quick. There's a lot on the internet, which sometimes would take people on the wrong route. The very first time I set it up, it took me about eight hours to find the right process. Once I found the right documentation, the deployment took 30 minutes.

I am an integrator and developer. I did the deployment and maintenance of the solution myself.

CloudStack is an open-source product. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. It provides good value.

I evaluated Microsoft. Microsoft has a proprietary lock-in system. It tries to hook us so tight we can't do anything. They try to control everything. I don't like that. I want to have control and do what I want, not what they want me to do.

I have used the solution more than once in the past twelve months. People might want to use payment for cost control if it is a private cloud. Even enterprises would use it for cost control. It's difficult to measure a return on investment. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

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 teammates have complained about the upgrade. The source code had massive files that had to be merged with our own development to upgrade to the latest version of CloudStack. It was quite painful for them. CloudStack could add some cost management tools to give me some control over the costs associated with the number of users of my services.

I have been using CloudStack for seven years.

CloudStack is highly stable.

The scalability is good. We don't have any problems with CloudStack. The main limitation we face is our own infrastructure. We have a limited number of bare metal servers.

We tried OpenStack, but provisioning the VMs was too complicated. It wasn't working for us, so we switched to CloudStack. We tried it out to see if we could provision the VMs, and we started building the integrations that our developers and development engineers need.

Deploying CloudStack is quite complex. It took a few months for us to spread it throughout the company and put it into production. We first implemented it in a development environment. 

We started working with the official third-party provider for CloudStack, but we were not satisfied with them, so we started developing the solution ourselves. 

We are using the open-source version.

I rate CloudStack eight out of 10. Make sure you have your on-premises solution for provisioning virtual machines. If you are going to do that, you must be sure that you need it because it's quite complicated. Although it works quite well, it's something really complicated.

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.

The market keeps changing, and so does technology. I think that container technology in CloudStack is an area that needs to be improved.

Regarding container technology, Kubernetes is something many people want to use and something which, as of now, many are using currently. However, there is still room for improvement in Kubernetes, particularly with networking functionality and network virtualization. When it comes to what needs to be improved in CloudStack, I would say that it should stay the way it is currently. It should continue being a stable product that people can rely on since many may be inclined to follow the latest trends and hype, which is not always good for a solution's stability. It is crucial to prioritize stability, which is a key factor that companies seek.

In my view, the platform could benefit from adding more metrics. More metrics would offer more insights and data on the platform's performance, utilization, and usage. Overall, I believe that having more metrics available would be highly desirable.

I have been using CloudStack for twelve years now. Also, our company uses a mixture of CloudStack 4.16 and 4.17. Also, our company is a user rather than a customer of the solution since it is open-source software.

Over the years, we have valued CloudStack for its stability. When we talk about stability, we're referring to technical stability and the fact that CloudStack is an Apache project with a clear and stable path that the project follows.

Scalability-wise, I rate this solution a nine out of ten. We have a team of nine engineers who are working on CloudStack infrastructure.

I have not contacted CloudStack's technical support team, but our company uses CloudStack's Mailing Lists community, where I also actively participate. Also, I would say that Apache does not directly provide support for CloudStack. Rather, it is through the community that surrounds it. That being said, I can rate the community's helpfulness at around an eight or nine out of ten.

Positive

The ease or difficulty of setting up CloudStack depends on one's level of knowledge. I would say that the setup is easy. However, one should possess some knowledge of what they are doing. So, it's not as simple as picking someone off the street and asking them to install the software. However, if you are a bit into technology, it's not a particularly difficult task to install.

When rating the solution's setup process, on a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy, I would rate it as a seven.

Regarding the initial deployment of CloudStack, approximately twelve years ago, it took us about one to two days to get it up and running for the first time. Right now, we can complete the setup process in a couple of hours because we have automated many things on our end. Additionally, we also have the experience of doing it so many times.

It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid.

Speaking about the factors that led us to choose CloudStack over other solutions like VMware or Cisco products, open source is frequently utilized in our company, as it allows us to determine our own roadmap and set our own pace for how we wish to proceed with the things we want to do. While using a commercial product, adhering to the roadmap and pace of that particular company providing you with the product is usually necessary. Therefore, if they indicate that a piece of software has reached its end of life, then it has reached its end of life and must be dealt with accordingly. Thus, opting for an open-source solution was a major requirement for us. Furthermore, the fact that it was an Apache project and we conducted tests that confirmed its functionality convinced us to choose it.

My biased advice would be to use the technology only after creating a proper design. This means doing thorough research and speaking with professionals with experience in implementing similar designs. It's important to have the design peer-reviewed by someone else before ordering any necessary hardware and attempting to deploy it. Additionally, consider seeking consultancy from a company like a UK-based company named ShapeBlue. Also, it is important to note that I don't work for ShapeBlue. Spending some money on professional help can get you up and running more smoothly.

Owing to the fact that when I consider the competition and available alternatives, CloudStack has proven to be an extremely reliable and durable piece of software in our company environment for over twelve years, and since I have no plans to switch to any other platform at this time, I rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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.

The number of contributors to this solution is relatively small compared to other solutions. However, if more frequent users of CloudStack contribute to the open-source community, it will significantly enhance the overall community experience and make it more useful for everyone involved.

There is room for improvement when it comes to maintenance options in CloudStack, particularly with regard to rolling maintenance for multiple Hypervisors. CloudStack does offer this option, but it has not always worked as expected. However, I believe that this largely depends on our expectations for the solution and how we want it to work. As an example, CloudStack maintains a list of Hypervisors where we can host our virtual machines, and we may need to update these Hypervisors on a regular basis, such as every month or every two weeks. Instead of having to perform manual updates, it would be helpful if there were options to automatically perform live migration and update the Hypervisors properly. While there are improvements being made in this area, I believe that there is still some work to be done. Ultimately, the effectiveness of these maintenance options depends on our specific requirements and how we expect the solution to function.

I have been using CloudStack for approximately three years.

While working with CloudStack, we have encountered several bugs, which we are addressing through collaboration and finding workarounds. However, we have observed that each new release is an improvement over the previous versions, even though it may not be considered entirely stable. Since new releases are made every six months, new bugs are likely to be discovered. While the platform is continuously improving, it may still be prone to instability due to ongoing development and changes.

I rate the stability of CloudStack a six out of ten.

The solution is scalable.

My team is using the solution in my company and our clients.

CloudStack is an open-source community that follows specific procedures for raising and addressing issues. However, there is no dedicated support team available since it is an open-source platform. If you encounter any issues or bugs, you can raise them by submitting a PR with detailed instructions on how to replicate the problem. The community members will then review and address the issue, as this is the standard process for addressing problems within an open-source community.

The setup of CloudStack is difficult. The time required for deploying CloudStack depends on the scale of the environment. For small-scale deployments, it may take a day at most to deploy the applications, assuming prior experience in deploying such applications. If you are an experienced person, you may be able to do it even faster. If the environment is well-prepared, with physical servers, networking setup, and other necessary equipment already in place, the deployment time for CloudStack services can be reduced to half a day. Mr. Arun suggests that the deployment time can vary depending on the level of expertise and the readiness of the environment.

The solution is open-source and free.

If you are considering implementing CloudStack, there are a few questions that you should ask yourself. What are your requirements? Is it for your internal use or are you planning to offer services to end customers? The answers to these questions will depend on the size of your implementation. If you are planning to use CloudStack for your own internal environment with a small number of users, but want to manage those users within the CloudStack environment, then it could be a good fit. However, if you are planning for a larger-scale implementation with the potential to scale to a significant number of users over time, then it would be wise to consider other options as well.

I rate CloudStack a seen out of ten.

The primary advantage of using CloudStack is its open-source nature. Once you have a solid understanding of the underlying technologies and how the platform operates, it is relatively straightforward to deploy and maintain your own infrastructure, whether it is for your internal team or company. In most cases, you can handle maintenance on your own, unless you require significant changes to the solutions' functionality, which may necessitate dependence on the community or the involvement of Java developers to maintain your infrastructure.

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.

The area of improvement could be the regionalization aspect. For example, managing multiple regions or CloudStack deployments together was not thought out thoroughly in the versions I used. We faced issues around managing the global infrastructure and had to develop around it.

I was using CloudStack at my old company, where I used it for about a year. I used versions 4.14 and 4.16, and 4.17.

There were a couple of times when we had to restart the management servers as it was unable to bring up the virtual machines. There were challenges with the nested virtualization.

I rate it a seven out of ten. The globalization part makes it difficult for us to scale.

There were different ways to set up: scalable and non-scalable way.

We had the whole thing running on top of Amazon Web Services, which added another layer of complexity because it had nested virtualization at that point. You are running VMs on a VM. It did not seem trivial to set up; it was definitely a challenge for us.

It is open source. We did not have to pay for any additional features.

Tagging is key if you want to manage more than a couple of resources.

I would rate Cloudstack an eight out of ten.