Climbing into the cloud with Apache CloudStack
Cloud Cover
Everybody's talking about the OpenStack cloud, but many users prefer Apache's CloudStack – another open source cloud system with a long history and a more unified design.
A cloud management system is really just an API or a web interface that configures the underlying hypervisor infrastructure. But the devil lies in the details. Apache CloudStack helps administrators deploy and manage a cloud environment.
CloudStack was founded as a start-up and, after a stop-over at Citrix, finally ended up with the Apache Software Foundation, where it has seen several updates. CloudStack differs from its major open source competitor OpenStack in that all of the cloud system's components were developed together. (OpenStack is made up of several separately developed subprojects, which has some disadvantages in terms of deployment and operations, as well as increased complexity.) What CloudStack has going for it – in addition to its open source code and monolithic structure – is the fact that it is widespread. The management API, which is based on REST principles – helps third parties implement add-ons that extend the feature scope in many directions.
Complex System; Simple Architecture
Complex systems are easiest to understand if you look at the easiest implementation. Figure 1 shows a very simply representation of a CloudStack cluster.
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