CloudStack rises to top level in Apache Software Foundation

Apache Cloudstack has risen to a top-level project after spending just under a year incubating at the Apache Software Foundation. CloudStack is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) platform which was originally developed by Cloud.com. Citrix acquired Cloud.com in July 2011; as one of the founding members of OpenStack, it was believed that Citrix would integrate CloudStack's hypervisor-agnostic platform into OpenStack. But that didn't happen; instead Citrix first open sourced the entire platform and then, several months later, it became a platinum member of the Apache Software Foundation, relicensed CloudStack 3 under the Apache 2.0 licence and submitted it to the Apache Incubator.

With an existing user base, stable deployments of scale, and already extensive experience in open source development, the CloudStack project has focused on adapting to the "Apache Way". "We've managed to build a diverse, friendly and very open community around CloudStack," said Chip Childers, Vice President of Apache CloudStack. Leaving the incubator means that the community and the development processes of the project are now regarded as "well-governed" in terms of the ASF principles. CloudStack is aimed at service providers and enterprises and as such competes directly with OpenStack and its own independent foundation.

The software already offers compute management, Network-as-a-service functionality, user and account management and resource accounting all fronted with either a native API, a web-based user interface, command-line tools, or a RESTful API. There are also AWS-compatible EC2 and S3 APIs for companies who want to use the Amazon Web Services APIs to ensure hybrid portability between a private and public cloud service. CloudStack works with VMware, KVM, XenServer, and the Xen Cloud Platform.

The current release of Cloudstack is version 4.0.1 which is available to download as source code or as deb or rpm binary packages for Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. An installation guide covers how to deploy CloudStack and is supplemented by release notes, administrator's guide, and API Developer's Guide.

(djwm)