Apache CloudStack adds API discovery and messaging

With API discovery service and a new event framework the latest version of Apache CloudStack, version 4.1, is expanding its capabilities in managing and coordinating cloud infrastructures. The IaaS platform has, in its first release since the project graduated from the Apache Incubator in March, added a service which allows end points in the infrastructure to describe the APIs they support and their associated details. According to the documentation there are over 300 APIs in CloudStack and the discovery service is used by the CLI to generate up a DSL on demand for controlling nodes. Future plans include using it to orchestrate API deployment on the cloud.

The Events Framework gives CloudStack an AMQP compatible event bus which supports publish, subscribe and unsubscribe operations. Based around a RabbitMQ plugin, it also introduces the idea of a state change event. The framework should allow for the creation of richer management applications. Other enhancements include the addition of L3 router functionality in the Nicera NVP (Network Virtualisation Platfrom) plugin which can now work with KVM as well as the previously supported Xen VMs. There is also the ability to throttle API requests, support for AWS-like regions and firewall rules for guest networks. The EC2 Query API, SSH key resetting on VMs, resizing of root and data volumes and auto scaling which coordinates with load balancing are also now supported.

CloudStack was initially developed by Cloud.com who were acquired by Citrix in July 2011. Citrix donated the project to Apache in April 2012 after the company re-evaluated its plans to merge CloudStack with OpenStack. CloudStack is modelled on Amazon's web services, EC2 and S3 and had, before being donated to Apache, been licensed under the GPL.

Source code and community contributed DEB and RPM packages are available from the CloudStack download page. It should be noted that there has been an issue with the Tomcat server included in the Cloudstack 4.1 source, which is used to run the management server; the developers have already fixed the issue and will be rolling out a 4.1.1 release very soon, though fixes are already included in the contributed 4.1 RPM packages and the DEB packages should be unaffected. Published under the Apache 2.0 license, source can also be found on the project's Git repository.

(djwm)