Apache CloudStack Still Going, Arrives in New Version

In case 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. It has even inspired a popular forked version.

Now, the Apache CloudStack project has announced the availability of Apache CloudStack v4.9, the latest version of the cloud platform used for creating private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Apache remains a steady steward for CloudStack, even as OpenStack has overtaken it in popularity.

Apache notes that CloudStack deployments still enable billions of dollars worth of business transactions annually. "Its maturity, stability and ease of deployment has led it to become the Open Source platform of choice for many service providers offering on-demand, elastic public Cloud computing services," Apache notes. "CloudStack is also leveraged by many enterprises to provide private or hybrid Clouds for use by their employees."

"We're delighted to be releasing Apache CloudStack 4.9," said Will Stevens, Vice President of Apache CloudStack. "This version brings many new and exciting features, with the continued emphasis on making Apache CloudStack the easiest Cloud platform to deploy and most reliable platform for running IaaS environments. This release is the culmination of many months of hard work by our diverse developer community."

CloudStack 4.9 has many new features and improvements, including:

Out-of-band power management of hosts through IPMI, iLO, DRAC

Enhancements to CloudStack networking model including deeper integration with Nuage VSP SDN

User defined security roles

More than 180 minor enhancements and issues fixed

An overview of all new enhancements can be found in the project release notes at http://docs.cloudstack.apache.org/projects/cloudstack-release-notes/en/4.9.0/

So who is still using CloudStack. Here are a few examples from Apache: Alcatel-Lucent, Autodesk, BT Cloud, China Telecom, KT/Korea Telecom, LeaseWeb, NTT, Orange, Schuberg Philis, Shopzilla, University of Melbourne, University of São Paolo, Verizon, and WebMD.

"Apache CloudStack has enabled us at Exoscale to build a public Cloud infrastructure offering that targets Cloud native teams directly," said Marc-Aurèle Brothier, Senior Developer at Exoscale. "CloudStack's flexibility lets us choose standard components for most workloads and then swap in our own code where our product and customers' needs demand it. We're excited to have contributed to CloudStack and also for the future of our CloudStack-based business."

CloudStack 4.9 is available now as a free download from http://cloudstack.apache.org/downloads.html. It is released under the Apache License v2.0.