A Significant Fork of CloudStack is Making Waves

It's official: There is now a significant fork of the CloudStack cloud computing platform. If you don't know its history, CloudStack had more momentum a few years ago as an open cloud platform than OpenStack has now.  Citrix, which owned it, passed the open source CloudStack platform to the Apache Software Foundation, and CloudStack continues to advance and is widely used.

However, in 2011, a team of four engineers from Schuberg Philis began building  the first stage of what would become called Mission Critical  Cloud (available on GitHub here). At first, the engineers started with a proof of  concept, and they built both an OpenStack and CloudStack orchestration  layers, but they gradually gravitated toward what is essentially a fork of CloudStack.

The engineers had determined that open cloud platforms did not have the stability and hardened testing that they required, so they build their own cloud platform. According to their blog post:

"Our goal was to build a cloud environment for both our engineers and our customers, one controlled with a standard API, that would use new and exciting technology and would help steer us towards the future while empowering us to deliver our 100% goal in everything we do."

"Our first development job we took on was to integrate Nicira into CloudStack. One of our engineers, Hugo Trippaers, boarded a plane to San Francisco with the addresses of Citrix and Nicira, and following months of coding we delivered Software Defined Networking into CloudStack. This was the second major step of our journey to IaaS, not waiting for vendors and their roadmaps, but defining a feature, building it and delivering it ourselves."

"Our future roadmap is mainly focused on our customer requirements. We are a Mission Critical company, and have a need to cater for High Performance Computing, support for containers and integrating with other new technologies such as Kubernetes, Mesos and Nomad. Our customers’ requirements change rapidly, and we need to be both agile in creating new components while also guaranteeing quality. Besides customer requirements we will also start working on improving the architecture of CloudStack. Items that spring to mind are the plug in model, removing dead code and refactoring of important items."

 This CloudStack fork will be worth watching, especially as it wraps in container smarts.