CloudStack Up Close

Article from ADMIN 17/2013

By Joe Casad

All the great open source cloud solutions have similar goals, but they all have different histories, different communities, and some subtly different areas of emphasis. We asked CloudStack VP Chip Childers about how Apache CloudStack fits in.

CloudStack

The CloudStack cloud solution has been around for several years and offers a formidable collections of services. CloudStack graduated from the Apache incubator to become a top-level Apache project earlier this year. What better time to check in with CloudStack VP Chip Childers on the state of the project and the path ahead?

Chip served as release manager for the CloudStack 4.0.0 and 4.1.0 releases. He is a principal engineer in the Cloud Engineering organization at SunGard Availability Services, where he is responsible for the overall architecture of SunGard's CloudStack-based service offerings. He also serves on the board of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and has several patents pending in the areas of infrastructure automation and orchestration system design. He is the maintainer of several open source projects dedicated to helping cloud operators understand their Apache CloudStack deployments through better visualizations and capacity planning simulation.

Joe Casad:

OpenStack seems to get more headline space, but CloudStack is also an open source cloud solution with similar goals. What distinguishes CloudStack from OpenStack and the other cloud alternatives? What makes CloudStack different?

Chip Childers:

There are a myriad of differences. The big differences are: