Citrix, Apache and Others Still Committed to CloudStack

In case you were wondering about recent reports of the demise of CloudStack, the folks at Citrix are remaining adamant that the cloud computing platform is healthy and in use at lots of notable organizations. In fact, at the recent CloudStack Collaboration Conference in Budapest, Autodesk, China Telecom, Dell, Walt Disney, and Huawei were all reported among active users of the platform. 

CloudStack doesn't get as much hype as OpenStack, but is advancing as an open source platform under Apache, and has a commercial arm overseen by Citrix.

Speakers at the conference in Budapest confirmed, as Citrix officials have said before, that CloudStack doesn't get the marketing and headlines that OpenStack gets, but were adamant that the cloud platform is flourishing.

TechWorld quoted Mark Hinkle, senior director of open source solutions at Citrix, on the platform: "CloudStack supports what can be described as a 'minimum viable cloud' [in terms of time to market]. There are multiple projects going on with OpenStack [via the OpenStack Foundation], while ours is more specific - cloud orchestration through a single interface."

Hinkle has also stressed that reports from a months ago about the demise of CloudStack are off base. In an online post, he writes:

"Even though we support and sponsor a great deal of development in Apache CloudStack we participate in a much larger cloud community...Unfortunately some of the pundits in our industry are speculating as part of a recent  reorganization at Citrix (and the departure of some of our former colleagues to pursue other opportunities) that this is a sign that we are abandoning our commitment to Apache CloudStack and the project would die. That’s probably because they don’t exactly understand how the Apache Software Foundation(ASF) works and how Citrix supports them."

"You can’t equate Citrix and Apache CloudStack. Even though many companies employ developers there is no company that can buy influence. A company can’t leave the project only individuals can choose to participate or not.  It’s unique compared to many other similar organizations so it’s no wonder they are confused. The fact of the matter is that Citrix will continue to support Apache CloudStack and will continue to collaborate with a growing community of developers and users." 

 Citrix has steadily maintained that while lots of enterprises are only considering OpenStack, CloudStack exists in many working deployments. So it's definitely not time to write CloudStack off.

We covered Apache's updates of the open source CloudStack platform last year.  "This latest version of CloudStack reflects months of hard work by our diverse developer community and brings even more features to help our service-provider and enterprise users enhance their cloud platforms," said Giles Sirett, member of the Apache CloudStack Project Management Committee, in a statement. "Apache CloudStack continues to grow in both deployments and developer community size, and is the platform of choice for thousands of organizations that need to build IaaS environments quickly and securely with a proven, production-grade, technology."