The CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2025 took place from November 19–21 at the Enterprise Hotel in Milan, bringing together CloudStack users, contributors, operators, and vendors from across the global community.
As a Diamond Sponsor of the event, ShapeBlue was proud to support three days of collaboration focused on real-world cloud infrastructure challenges, open-source innovation, and the future direction of CloudStack. This year’s conference blended hands-on collaboration with deep technical sessions, creating space for both practical problem-solving and strategic discussion.
Hackathon and Community Collaboration
The conference opened with a community hackathon, giving contributors and operators the opportunity to work directly on CloudStack issues, improvements, and ideas. This hands-on format encouraged collaboration across all experience levels and allowed attendees to contribute code, review features, and explore enhancements together.
The hackathon set the tone for the rest of the event, reinforcing the community-driven nature of the CloudStack project and the value of in-person collaboration.
Technical Sessions and Industry Insights
Across the remainder of the conference, sessions covered a wide range of topics including networking, storage, automation, migration strategies, and operating CloudStack at scale.
Speakers shared practical experiences from production environments, explored recent and upcoming CloudStack features, and discussed how organisations are adapting their cloud platforms to meet evolving enterprise requirements.
Discussions extended well beyond the presentation rooms, with many of the most valuable conversations continuing in breakout spaces and informal meet-ups throughout the venue.
ShapeBlue Sessions at CCC 2025
The ShapeBlue team delivered a broad set of sessions covering CloudStack’s current state, core architecture, and emerging capabilities. Topics ranged from the project’s overall direction and roadmap to deep technical dives into extensions, networking, VM placement logic, scalability, and GPU orchestration. ShapeBlue speakers also shared practical guidance on large scale VMware to CloudStack migrations, Kubernetes service enhancements, and building modern monitoring stacks using Prometheus and Grafana. Together, these sessions provided both strategic context and hands on technical insight, sparking detailed follow up discussions throughout the event. Find the ShapeBlue sessions below!
Keynote: State of the Union – Nicolas Vazquez, CloudStack VP & Lead Software Engineer at ShapeBlue
In this State of the Union talk, CloudStack VP and Lead Software Engineer at ShapeBlue, Nicolas Vazquez, takes the audience through the past year of collaboration, project developments, and community progress. He also shares his vision for where CloudStack is headed in the years ahead.
Extensions Framework (XaaS) – Enabling Orchestrate Anything – Harikrishna Patnala (Lead Software Engineer) & Marco Sinhoreli (Technical Marketing Manager), ShapeBlue
In this session, Harkrishna and Marco dive into the CloudStack XaaS Extensions Framework! 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.
Customizing CloudStack Network Topology with VNF Appliances – Wei Zhou, Software Architect, ShapeBlue
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 provides an overview of VNF appliances and showcases some real-world use cases. It also introduces ongoing work on the VNF provider framework, which offers much better integration with VNF appliances. Topics includes technical details, the built-in VNF provider, and guidance on how to develop custom VNF providers.
Migrating 1000’s of VMs from VMware to CloudStack – Lucian Burlacu, Cloud Architect, ShapeBlue
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 explores some of the technical steps involved.
Where’s my Instance? How CloudStack Finds a Suitable Deployment Destination – Jithin Raju, Cloud Architect, ShapeBlue
Apache CloudStack’s VM placement logic is powerful but often misunderstood. This session, held by Jithin Raju from ShapeBlue, explains how CloudStack selects the most suitable deployment destination across zones, pods, clusters, hosts, and storage. Jithin breaks down the roles of deployment planners, allocation algorithms, and capacity checks, and shows how these components work together to determine where a VM should run. Watch the session back to gain a clear understanding of CloudStack’s decision-making flow and to learn how to design and tune environments for predictable, efficient VM deployments.
VMware to KVM Migration Tooling in CloudStack – Nicolas Vazquez, Lead Software Engineer, ShapeBlue
Jamie had been involved in marketing for 3 years prior to joining the company. He is heavily involved in the marketing activities for both ShapeBlue and Apache CloudStack. In his free time, Jamie likes training MMA and rugby.
