Apache CloudStack 4.1.0 Cloud Computing Platform Arrives

In late October, we reported that It's been six months since Citrix contributed its CloudStack open source cloud computing platform to the Apache Software Foundation. Then, Apache advanced Cloudstack with an incubator version. And sure enough, in keeping with Apache's dependable care and feeding of open source projects, project leaders announced the arrival of Apache CloudStack 4.1.0 just a few days ago. The news arrived via mailing list from Joe Brockmeier, who used to write here on OStatic.

According to the post:

"The Apache CloudStack project is pleased to announce the 4.1.0 release of the CloudStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration platform. This is the first major release from Apache CloudStack since its graduation from the Apache Incubator on March 20th."

"Apache CloudStack is an integrated software platform that allows users to build a feature-rich IaaS. CloudStack includes an intuitive user interface and rich API for managing the compute, networking, accounting, and storage resources for private, hybrid, or public clouds."

The team at Apache has been working for more than five months on this project.

Some of the notable new features in Apache CloudStack 4.1.0 include:

* An API discovery service that allows an end point to list its supported APIs and their details.

* Added an Events Framework to CloudStack to provide an "event bus" with publish, subscribe, and unsubscribe semantics.

* L3 router functionality in the Nicira NVP plugin, and including support for KVM (previously Xen-only).

* API request throttling to prevent attacks via frequent API requests.

* AWS-style regions.

* Egress firewall rules for guest networks.

* Resizing root and data volumes.

* Support for EC2 Query API.

* Autoscaling support in conjunction with load balancing devices such as NetScaler.

It sounds like CloudStack is taking on some capabilities and APIs that will allow it to behave a lot like Amazon's EC2. Enhancements to the incubtor version of CloudStack included support for Amazon Web Services APIs. These extend to the Elastic Compute Cloud API, and Amazon cloud integration is basically now baked into CloudStack, with flexibility offered to developers.

The official source is available from: http://cloudstack.apache.org/downloads.html