CloudStack Goes Open Source

Hitting the front page for the first time, ke4qqq writes "CloudStack has dropped the open core model and gone completely open source. The latest merge of formerly-proprietary features include VMware and OracleVM support as well as support for dynamically managing hardware network and storage devices. CloudStack is the same software used by Edmunds.com, Zynga, Godaddy, and 60 other of the largest clouds."

Meanwhile, in VMWare's HQ...

[alfredos]

Guys, someone else is offering a free hypervisor with goodies. Quick, rename and split again everything. And let's make a few things other than the hypervisors actually work this time!

Re:Meanwhile, in VMWare's HQ...

[Nautica]

Actually it isn't a hypervisor. It is a IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) product/platform that supports several different hypervisors.

Well that's good news

[ctrl-c_ctrl-x]

Hooefully this will result in many more cloud providers. More competition in the market is a good thing IMHO.

Re:

[dipskinny]

You're looking at this backwards. CloudStack IS already a very viable alternative. It was just acquired by Citrix for more than $200 million and is ahead of OpenStack in maturity and go-live users. But OpenStack has greater momentum from the developer & partner community. So the question is ... will CloudStack merge with the OpenStack community as was implied when it was acquired by Citrix, or will it go it alone and pilfer the OpenStack codebase? Note: OpenStack uses the very open Apache License, Vers

just what is CloudStack?

[Gravis Zero]

CloudStack is open source software written in java that is designed to deploy and and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, scalable cloud computing platform. CloudStack current supports the most popular open source hypervisors, KVM and Xen. CloudStack offers three ways to manage cloud computing environments: a easy-to-use web interface, command line and a full-featured RESTful API.

http://www.cloudstack.org/ [cloudstack.org]

Does Zynga use it?

[PCM2]

Does Zynga really use CloudStack? In its pre-IPO filing, [sec.gov] Zynga says this:

Our technology infrastructure is critical to the performance of our games and to player satisfaction. Our games run on a complex distributed system, or what is commonly known as cloud computing. We own, operate and maintain elements of this system, but significant elements of this system are operated by third parties that we do not control and which would require significant time to replace. We expect this dependence on third parties to continue. In particular, a significant majority of our game traffic is hosted by Amazon Web Services, or AWS, which service uses multiple locations.

(emphasis mine)

Re:

[Jsutton1027w]

Cloudstack is more of a management component; it's not a hypervisor. It supports multiple hypervisors and manages the resources that they host. The Cloudstack download page (http://cloudstack.org/download.html) indicates that they have an Amazon EC2 compatibility server. It describes it like this: "The CloudBridge provides an Amazon EC2 compatible API via both SOAP and REST web services. The EC2 API is translated to native CloudStack API calls by the CloudBridge. Clients can continue using existing EC2-c

Please

[jnpcl]

Somebody find a 0-day and nuke Zynga from orbit. It's the only way to be sure!

cloudstack

[bmullan]

cloudstack is a cloud orchestration toolset/api that supports multi-tenant cloud provisioning & services. it appears to be a fairly complete architecture but is also in a transitional phase as they try to implement support for further cloud hypervisor environments.
They are contributing to OpenStack and from what I understand will include OpenStack as an component of CloudStack's future development.
Here's a good writeup & summary:
http://cloudstack.org/blog/cloudstack-the-best-kept-secret-in-clo [cloudstack.org]