The Underdog of the Cloud Computing World...

When I was about six years old, around 1981, on channel 10, a CBS station, broadcasting out of Lafayette, Louisiana, the Underdog cartoon TV show would come on. From birth, I was rooting for the New Orleans Saints, complete with my own little brown paper bag to be placed on my head during the really bad seasons. So, I suppose I have always had an affinity for the underdog. Just over 20 years into my career, I find myself putting time, money and resources into another underdog; Apache CloudStack.

Everyone knows about VMware, Hyper-V, Xen, OpenStack, so on and so forth. But there is a dark horse out there called CloudStack. CloudStack is the latest technological underdog that I have adopted. I started using the platform in 2008 after it was released on cloud.com. In 2011, Citrix bought it, but eventually gave it back to the open source community under the Apache Software Foundation. During the time that Citrix acquired CloudStack, OpenStack came onto the scene, adoption and acceptance of OpenStack accelerated and (in my opinion) stole away the momentum that had once belonged to CloudStack.

So there I was in early 2016, and the time came for me to build out a new cloud for our customers here at CloudBrix. Being the responsible CTO I am, I set out to decide upon what I should use to build out my new cloud. The "due diligence" began. So here is a summation of the points in the decision:

• VMware - Costs a ton of money to get started, costs more money for the support, costs even more money to get a decent guy to maintain it and frankly, I was just plain sick and tired of handing these guys money every time I turned around. Not to mention the "gap" deal they pull on you should you not renew for a year or two. They make you pay for those skipped years, PLUS your renewal. Opinions vary, I'm not saying I don't understand that policy, I just do not like it. And, what's the deal with the 5000 different products, versions, editions, etc.? I have been using VMware since the early 3.5 version, and it was confusing back then, now it's even worse. Otherwise, it's a solid, stable widely adopted platform.
• Hyper-V - Holy hell. Great all the way around, but let's face it, it's Microsoft. Powershell helps, and it's ability to tie into Azure is wonderful. Then I saw what it takes to get a VM converted and running in Azure. Again, the costs, the pain and suffering of knowing that Microsoft has looped me back into their grasp was a little too chilling for me.
• Xen - Ever just not liked something? That was it. I used it before, it worked, it wasn't bad, it served up desktops all well and good, but I just simply didn't like it.
• OpenStack - Well, now things are getting a little interesting. Free. Huge community adoption. A "complex installation process" would be an understatement. Too many moving parts worries me, and there are a lot of pieces and parts to OpenStack, and they all have to line up, otherwise you have a mess. Still was in the running, but not too keen on the idea.
• CloudStack - I went and checked it out again to see where it was at in its life cycle. It's done nothing but improve. Adoption was not nearly as widespread, but the faithful were still there in the user groups and community websites. The installation and setup was not nearly as complex as OpenStack and it was just as powerful, comprehensive and agile as I remembered, just a bit more mature and evolved.

Decision made.

The underdog won again for me, but let's face it, I was bit biased. But I at least looked at the other options.

CloudStack has been in production in our environment for over six months now. We elected to use KVM as our hypervisor. We coupled CloudStack with GlusterFS and took advantage of RDMA over Infiniband to access our SSD primary storage tier. Between the user communities of CloudStack and GlusterFS, plus the support of Mellanox, we were able to build a cloud that we are proud to provide to our customers. Even the guys at ShapeBlue, gave us some pointers in the IRC channel.

Presently, we are investing heavily in improving the platform. Our focus is improving a few areas to start such as, Storage Availability Checking, Dynamic Compute Load Balancing and a VM conversion system that allows you to upload and convert your VM's between different hypervisor formats. All of this being made possible because of the support and devotion of a small community of users and contributors.

Moving forward, CloudBrix is endeavoring to evolve our business into an ecosystem of technologies and services. This path will ultimately serve our customers more effectively and efficiently, all the while delivering the reliability and cost-effective solution that they, and the rest of the market expects. We are looking to change the way managed services and infrastructure services are being delivered to the customer and make the lives of our customers a lot less stressful. CloudStack is a stepping stone on this path.