Open Source projects are great at encouraging chest thumping and misty eyes, but the really exciting thing about them is when they start to actually come to life – as in ship real products that can be used. Linux was an exciting idea when it was Linus Torvalds’ project at home in Helsinki, but it was magical once it was out in the open and starting to become the thing that powered much of the web. So too with open source cloud initiatives – OpenStack has built an awesome ecosystem, but I’m really excited about the case studies they have built around enterprises actually deploying the stuff.
So when Citrix announced that Cloudstack (formerly cloud.com) was being taken on as a project by the Apache Software Foundation, it was super exciting from a “let’s all us industry insiders navel gaze and prognosticate” perspective, but little else. So it’s exciting, having seen that announcement back in April, to see Apache announcing an incubation release of CloudStack 4.0.0 – the first release from within the ASF. The release is the result of six months of development and build new features on top of the CloudStack core. Specific features of the release include:
- Inter-VLAN Routing (VPC)
- Site-to-Site VPN
- Local Storage Support for Data Volumes
- Virtual Resource Tagging
- Secure Console Access on XenServer
- Added the ability to create a VM without immediately starting it (via API)
- Upload an Existing Volume to a Virtual Machine
- Dedicated High-Availability Hosts
- Support for Amazon Web Services API (formerly a separate package)
- AWS API Extensions to include Tagging
- Support for Nicira NVP (L2)
- Ceph RBD Support for KVM
- Support for Caringo as Secondary Storage
I’m not going to enter into the dogmatic war of words between competing open cloud initiatives – partly because the fact that I curate the CloudU program sponsored by Rackspace could be seen by some as overly conflicting but mainly because I’m a supporter of open clouds per se, a vibrant and open cloud ecosystem is good for all customers, which flavor of open cloud within that wins is very much secondary.
So congratulations to ASF and the broader CloudStack ecosystem on this release – open clouds forever!
