Apache CloudStack is an open-source infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform designed for building and managing public, private, and hybrid clouds. It supports various hypervisors, integrates APIs for management, and provides features such as flexible networking, load balancing, and snapshot capabilities. The platform emphasizes community-driven governance, with continuous enhancements through regular releases.

1. Apache CloudStack:
From API to UI
Joe Brockmeier
PMC Member Apache CloudStack
jzb@apache.org
Twitter: @jzb | Freenode: jzb

2. Five Six Characteristics of Clouds
• On-Demand Self-Service
• Broad Network Access
• Resource Pooling
• Rapid Elasticity
• Measured Service
• API Access

3. Cloud Service Models
USER CLOUD a.k.a. SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE
Single application, multi-tenancy, network-based, one-to-many delivery of
applications, all users have same access to features.
Examples: Salesforce.com, Google Docs, Red Hat Network/RHEL
DEVELOPMENT CLOUD a.k.a. PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE
Application developer model, Application deployed to an elastic service that
autoscales, low administrative overhead. No concept of virtual machines or
operating system. Code it and deploy it.
Examples: VMware CloudFoundry, Google AppEngine, Windows
Azure, Rackspace Sites, Red Hat OpenShift, Active State Stackato, Appfog
SYSTEMS CLOUD a.k.a INFRASTRUCTURE-AS-A-SERVICE
Servers and storage are made available in a scalable way over a network.
Examples: EC2,Rackspace
CloudFiles, OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, OpenNebula

4. Deployment Models

5. What is Apache CloudStack?
• Open Source (Apache-Licensed) IaaS
• Community of Users and Providers
• Written in Java*
• Provides a Turn-Key “Stack” for Running
Public, Private, or Hybrid Clouds
• Hypervisor Agnostic*
• Time-Based Releases

6. In the beginning…
• Started as VMOps Cloud Stack (2008)
• Became Cloud.com in 2010
• Released CloudStack under GPLv3 – but Open
Core (May 2010)
• Acquired by Citrix (July 2011)
• Entirely Open Source (August 2011)

7. Going to Apache
• Relicensed & Proposed to Apache (April
3, 2012)
• Accepted as an Incubating Project (April
16, 2012)
• First Major Release, 4.0.0-incubating
(November 6, 2012)
• First Minor Release, 4.0.1-incubating
(February 12, 2013)

8. Why Apache?
• Known and Proven Governance Model
• Active Mentoring of New Projects
• 100% Community-Driven
• More than 3,000 Developers
• Many Successful Projects: Apache
HTTPD, Tomcat, Hadoop, Cassandra, Lucene, e
tc.

9. Apache Process
• 100% Community-Driven
• “If It Didn’t Happen on the Mailing List…”
• Clear Governance (PPMC, Committer,
Contributor, etc.)
• Community Over Code
• Rigorous Attention to Licenses
• Can Seem Bureaucratic

10. Results!

11. What CloudStack Provides

12. Hypervisor Support
• KVM
• XenServer
• Xen Cloud Platform
• VMware via vCenter
• Bare Metal via IPMI

13. CloudStack Terminology
• Zone: Availability zone, aka
Regions. Could be worldwide.
Different data centers
• Pods: Racks or aisles in a data
center
• Clusters: Group of machines
with a common type of
Hypervisor
• Host: A Single server
• Primary Storage: Shared
storage across a cluster
• Secondary Storage: Shared
storage in a single Zone

14. CloudStack Architecture
Internet  Hypervisor is the basic unit of
CloudStack
Management scale.
Server
Zone 1  Cluster consists of one ore
more hosts of same hypervisor
L3 core
 All hosts in cluster have access
to shared (primary) storage
Pod 1 Access Layer Pod N
Secondary
 Pod is one or more
…. Storage clusters, usually with L2
Cluster N switches.
 Availability Zone has one or
…. more pods, has access to
secondary storage.
Cluster 1
 One or more zones represent
Host 1 cloud
Primary
Storage
Host 2

15. CloudStack Storage
• Primary Storage:
– Anything that can be mounted on the node of a cluster.
– Cluster LVM…iSCSI…
– Holds disk images of running VMs
– Support for CEPH with KVM hypervisors
• Secondary Storage:
– Available across the zone
– Holds snapshots and templates (image repo)
– Can use OpenStack swift or any object store (Gluster FS…)
– New support for Caringo
• Can use NFS for both to start
• Storage abstraction refactoring underway in 4.1.0 and 4.2.0

16. Networking
• Extremely flexible to:
– Provide isolation with VLANs
– Provide isolation at L3 with shared L2 (scalability)
– Support hardware devices that exposes API
– Deployed on existing networking infrastructure
– Support new networking paradigm (SDN)
• Support for Nicira Virtual P
• Extensive use of Open VSwitch

17. Management Server
• All UI functionality is available as an API call
• Restful API
– Unauthenticated API on 8096 for localhost
(disabled by default)
– Authenticated on port 8080
– Responses in XML or JSON

18. Highly Scalable
• Up to 10K resources managed per
management server node
• Internal testing w/software simulators shows
up to 30K physical resources and 30K VMs
managed by 4 management server nodes.
• Real production deployments of tens of
thousands of resources
• See Alex Huang’s presentation:
http://is.gd/alexh_scale

19. CloudStack Allocation
• How are VMs placed, storage allocated, etc.?
• CloudStack has several defaults
– First fit
– Fill first
– Disperse
• Don’t like those? Create your own!
• Allows over-provsioning
• OS Preference

20. High Availability
• RFMTTR – “really fast mean time to recovery.”
• CloudStack is not (alone) a magical HA
solution.
• Watches HA-enabled VMs to ensure they’re
up, and that the hypervisor it’s on is up. Will
restart on another if the hypervisor goes
down.
• Redundant router.

21. Load Balancing
• Uses HA Proxy
• CloudStack supports load-balancing for
distributing traffic to its instances
• Choose between round-robin, source, or least
connections
• Choose stickiness policy
(source, lbcookie, appcookie)

22. Snapshots
• CloudStack allows you to take snapshots
manually or set up recurring snapshots.
• Snapshots can be managed automagically
(keep N number) and manually (delete
snapshot manually).
• Can be turned into templates or volumes to
be used by other instances.

23. CloudStack Networking
• CloudStack manages
– DHCP
– VLAN allocation
– Firewall
– NAT/Port forwarding
– Routing
– VPN
– Load Balancing
• CloudStack can manage physical network hardware
(F5-Big IP, NetScaler, Juniper SRX)

24. CloudStack Networking Types
• CloudStack offers Basic and Advanced
Networking
– Basic: Easy, can only be one physical network
• Every host, system VM, and guest instance has a unique
IP
– Advanced: Allows multiple physical networks
• Each account has a public IP, assigned to virtual
router, guest IP range (e.g. 10.0.1.10/24), and VLAN ID
for the isolated guest network
• Guests communicate via their own dedicated VLAN

25. CloudStack Networks
• Management Network: Used by hypervisors and
management server to communicate
• Private Network: Default network for system VMs
(virtual router, secondary storage VM, console
proxy VM)
• Public Network: Public-facing (e.g. the Internet)
• Guest Network: Network VMs are provisioned on
• Link-local Network: Network used for
communication between hypervisor and system
VMs. (RFC 3927)

26. Security Groups
• Traditional isolation has been via VLAN
• VLANs provide isolation, but at the cost of
scaling
– Standard limit is 4,096 VLANs
– Hardware that supports upper limit is expensive
– What happens with 4,097?
• Amazon and others use Layer 3 isolation
(Security Groups)

27. Security Groups
• Assumes a quasi-trusted Layer 2 network
• Filtering/isolation happens at the bridge level
(think ebtables)
• Deny by default

28. Accounts, Domains, and Projects
• CloudStack has a top-level domain called ROOT
• You can create sub-domains
• You can create 3 types of
accounts, admins, domain-admins, or users
• Projects can be used to hold resources for time-
limited projects
• Supports LDAP integration
• CloudStack’s account system is very simple –
don’t make it more complicated!

29. Usage Accounting
• Provides stats that can be used for billing (but
is not a billing solution)
• Usage stats show: VM count, CPU usage, disk
allocation and use, network usage over time.
• Integration howtos for importing to
Excel, Ubersmith, Amysta, and Cloud Portal.

30. APIs
• Root Admin, Domain Admin, User
• Set of methods available over HTTP(S)
• Authenticated on 8080 w/Keys
• Unauthenticated on 8096 (off by default)
• Python + Ruby clients available

32. AWS EC2 and S3 Compatibility
• Includes an EC2/S3 compatibility layer
• See:
– http://wiki.cloudstack.org/display/RelOps/EC2+AP
I+support+in+CloudStack
– http://www.slideshare.net/sebastiengoasguen/clo
udstack-ec2-configuration
• Euca Tools, Boto, etc. should work with
CloudStack

33. CloudMonkey
• New ASF CloudStack CLI
• Python code, built using Marvin
• https://cwiki.apache.org/CLOUDSTACK/clouds
tack-cloudmonkey-cli.html
• Available from CloudStack source or pypi:
– http://pypi.python.org/pypi/cloudmonkey/

34. Use Cases
• Private Cloud
• Dual-Workload Private Cloud
• Public Cloud (ISP/Providers)
• Hybrid Cloud
• Small to Very, Very Large

35. Zynga
• Online Games
• Hybrid Cloud (Move
workloads between
“zCloud” and public
cloud) 80/20 split
• North of 30K Nodes

36. Datapipe
• Public Cloud
• Geo-distributed:
– U.S. (NJ & San Jose, CA)
– Hong Kong
– Shanghai
– London
– Iceland (w/in 90 days)
• Smaller (< 100 Hosts) but
massively distributed
• See:
http://is.gd/datapipe_cs

37. ISWest
• Hosted IaaS Clouds
(Private Environment)
from Dedicated Servers
• Most Customers are
Small (< 15 VMs)
• Mix of Hypervisors
• Functioning Cloud in “a
little over a month.”

38. Trying CloudStack

39. DevCloud
• DevCloud is a VirtualBox image w/nested virt.
• Grab the DevCloud image from:
http://wiki.cloudstack.org/display/COMM/DevCloud
• Log in via the GUI:
http://localhost:8080/client
• SSH to DevCloud:
ssh -p 2222 root@localhost
Username: admin Password: password
• DevCloud KVM – effort to run DevCloud on a KVM host

40. CloudStack Runbook
• Minimal install (1 server)
• Written by David Nalley w/fixes from the
community
• http://people.apache.org/~ke4qqq/runbook/
• Focuses on CentOS w/KVM – other runbooks
in process for Ubuntu w/Xen or KVM.

41. Direction
• Currently on a Four-Month Release Cycle
• 4.1.0 Expected Early April, 4.2.0 in August
• 4.0.2 “Any Day Now”
• Releases Supported Until Next Major Feature
Release (e.g., 4.0.0, 4.0.x until 4.1.0)
• Last Major Release Will Receive Support for 12
Months (hasn’t happened yet)

42. Expected in 4.1.0
• AutoScale: Work with loadbalancers (like
NetScaler) to scale up/down resources.
• Resize Volumes for Instances
• OpenVSwitch Support for KVM
• API Request Throttling
• AWS-like Regions
• Persistent Networks without Running
Instances

43. Get Involved
• Main Site: CloudStack.org
• IRC: #cloudstack and #cloudstack-dev
• Follow @cloudstack on Twitter
• Lots of Presos:
http://slideshare.net/cloudstack
• Mailing Lists:
http://cloudstack.org/discuss/mailing-
lists.html

44. Contact Me
Email: jzb@apache.org
Phone: +1 314-669-4JZB
(4592)
Blog: http://dissociatedpress.net/
Twitter: