The stage is set: this year’s CloudStack Collaboration Conference returns to Milan, Italy, from November 19–21. ShapeBlue is proud to once again play an active role — supporting the event as a Diamond Sponsor and contributing to the agenda with deep technical insight.

This year’s event is expected to be the largest #CloudStackCollab to date. With a full agenda of technical deep dives, use-case stories, workshops, and panel discussions, attendees can expect cutting-edge insights into CloudStack’s ongoing evolution, along with opportunities to share knowledge and learn from one another about the latest advancements in open-source cloud and virtualization management.

In this blog, we share the sessions our team will be presenting at the event. If you haven’t registered yet, there’s still time to join the CloudStack community in Milan.

Our Team’s Sessions

Keynote: Cloud Without Compromise: Building the Future of Open Infrastructure – Giles Sirett

In a cloud world dominated by hyperscalers and licensing upheaval, IaaS remains the enterprise foundation. This keynote explores why open, sovereign infrastructure matters, how Apache CloudStack delivers proven enterprise IaaS today, and recent innovations that position it as the strategic platform for the next decade of cloud.

 

 

State of the Union – Nicolas Vazquez

The Apache CloudStack project has had another exciting year – with growth in adoption, functionality and community size. In the project’s annual State of The Union talk, the current VP of the project, Nicolas Vazquez, reflects on the last year of the project’s collaboration, developments in CloudStack and community activity. He sets out how he sees the project developing over the next few years.

 

 

Migrating 1000’s of VMs from VMware to CloudStack – Lucian Burlacu

Migrating thousands of VMs from VMware to CloudStack enables companies and individuals to cut costs, escape vendor lock-in, and gain operational agility. With the right automation and phased approach, large-scale migrations can be achieved with minimal disruption. This session will explore some of the technical steps involved.

 

 

Extensions Framework (XaaS) – Enabling Orchestrate Anything – Harikrishna Patnala

The Extensions Framework in Apache CloudStack enables seamless integration of external services (XaaS) into the CloudStack ecosystem. It allows operators to register and manage custom extensions, supporting a wide range of types such as orchestrators, network elements, and authenticators. This empowers users to tailor CloudStack’s behaviour to their infrastructure needs. CloudStack also ships with several inbuilt extensions, including Proxmox, Hyper-V, and Canonical MaaS, demonstrating the flexibility of the framework. For instance, a Proxmox extension can manage VM lifecycles through custom scripts, showcasing the power and adaptability of CloudStack’s extension model.

Customizing CloudStack Network Topology with VNF Appliances – Wei Zhou

The VNF appliance, introduced in Apache CloudStack 4.19, has been used by several CloudStack users as an alternative to the CloudStack Virtual Router. This talk will provide an overview of VNF appliances and showcase some real-world use cases. It will also introduce ongoing work on the VNF provider framework, which offers much better integration with VNF appliances. Topics will include technical details, the built-in VNF provider, and guidance on how to develop custom VNF providers.The VNF appliance, introduced in Apache CloudStack 4.19, has been used by several CloudStack users as an alternative to the CloudStack Virtual Router. This talk will provide an overview of VNF appliances and showcase some real-world use cases. It will also introduce ongoing work on the VNF provider framework, which offers much better integration with VNF appliances. Topics will include technical details, the built-in VNF provider, and guidance on how to develop custom VNF providers.

 

Orchestrating GPU workloads with CloudStack – Vishesh Jindal

This talk dives into the technical design and implementation of native GPU orchestration in Apache CloudStack 4.21 on KVM, including device discovery, capability classification, and inventory synchronization via the KVM agent. Attendees will see how GPU‑backed service offerings are defined and consumed by Instances. We will cover operator prerequisites and host setup (IOMMU, vendor vGPU profiles), and lifecycle operations from provisioning to teardown. A live demo walks through GPU discovery on host, offering creation, and end‑to‑end deployment.

 

Where’s my instance? How CloudStack finds a suitable deployment destination – Jithin Raju

This session is a deep dive with examples and use cases on all deployment planners and allocation algorithms.

 

 

 

VMware to KVM Migration Tooling in CloudStack – Nicolas Vazquez

This talk will show the current state of the VMware to KVM migration tool, focusing on the improvements since the initial version and what’s next.

 

 

 

 

How Scalable is CloudStack? – Boris Stoyanov

CloudStack has always known to be scalable, but just how scalable? In this talk, Boris will discuss the known and anticipated CloudStack scalability limits. He will discuss design decisions that should be made to accommodate growth and will use examples of organisations running CloudStack at massive scale.

 

 

Building Complex Scalable Networks in CloudStack. The Power of IPv6+BGP – Alex Mattioli

With the addition of dynamic routing to CloudStack many opportunities open up for end-users to create richer and more complex network topologies with IPv6. In this talk we’ll see how end users can now create their own publicly routable networks with no operator intervention.

 

 

 

Enhancements on the CloudStack Kubernetes Service – Pearl Dsilva

This talk will go through the latest enhancements on CloudStack Kubernetes Service (CKS) since

4.21 including:

– Registering templates to be used for CKS nodes

– Template and service offering selection per CKS

node type

– Possibility to separate the etcd service to dedicated CKS nodes

– Add external nodes to an existing CKS cluster

– CNI configuration integration with CKS cluster deployment

– CSI integration

Cloudstack-related Infrastructure Monitoring using Grafana Stack – Kiran Chavala

Monitoring is critical for running a reliable and performant cloud environment. Apache CloudStack provides rich APls and metrics, but turning this data into actionable insights requires a modern observability stack. In this session, we will demonstrate how to build a complete monitoring solution for CloudStack using Prometheus, Alertmanager, and Grafana – the Grafana stack.

We’ll walk through the architecture for collecting and visualizing CloudStack metrics, including:

• Configuring Prometheus to scrape

CloudStack metrics (via AP| or exporters).

• Tracking VM, host, storage, and network utilization.
• Building intuitive Grafana dashboards for operators and tenants.
• Setting up automated alerts for capacity thresholds and failures.
• Attendees will also gain insights into key advantages of this approach:
• Unified Visibility: Single-pane-of-glass view for CloudStack management servers, hypervisors, and system VMs.
• Proactive Operations: Early detection of capacity bottlenecks, API latency, and infrastructure anomalies.
• Scalability: Easily extend monitoring as

CloudStack regions/zones grow.

• Automation-Friendly: Integrate alerts with ticketing systems or autoscaling workflows.
• Open & Flexible: Fully open-source, customizable dashboards with support for long-term metric retention.