GSoC Apurv Interview

GSoC 2021 and Apache CloudStack: The Results

With 16,000+ participants from 111 countries and 715 open-source organizations participating, Google Summer of Code is one of the most popular programs which helps students enter the technology world and gain new skills. GSoC pairs students with mentors from participating open-source organizations, allowing students to face the real world of software development and coding. For a year in a row, ShapeBlue and Apache CloudStack have been participating in the program and we are glad to share the success story of one of the students who successfully passed it.  He is doing a Master Degree in Computer Science & Engineering from […]

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The C-level Perspective on Running Open-Source Cloud with Ceph and CloudStack - Blog

The C-level Perspective on Running Open-Source Cloud with Ceph and CloudStack

The cloud and hosting market has experienced a complete transformation during the last decade. While previously there was a range of mid-sized local cloud providers dominating the market in each country, many providers were acquired by VC’s, larger providers, telcos and third-party enterprises in the last ten years. It is getting harder and harder for individual cloud providers to survive in the battle with competition and the hyperscalers. However, these companies can offer unique and tailor-made solutions, which can better match their customers’ needs. The technology stack behind these services is one of their most significant advantages. Having better, faster […]

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Pricing IaaS the Right Way

Pricing Your IaaS Offering the Right Way

There is currently enormous market demand for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), with organisations looking for the right solution to host their applications and workloads, build a high-performing test/dev environment or deploy a hybrid cloud solution. Others, like telcos and MSPs, need to offer a full range of services to their customers, and the cloud is key for them. This means the IaaS market is attractive for service providers around the globe to enter and launch public cloud services. Whether you launch a new service on existing infrastructure or deploy completely new infrastructure, correct pricing is vital to ensure your […]

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Customizing new CloudStack UI - Cover

Customising the CloudStack UI

A lot of work has gone into the CloudStack UI recently, and it is now a modern, role-based UI that not only gives a fresh look to CloudStack but also makes development and customisation much easier. In this blog, I provide guidance on how to customise the UI, and have classified customisation into two categories – basic and advanced. Basic Customisations Users can customise the UI by means of this configuration file: /etc/cloudstack/management/config.json to modify theme, logos, etc. as required. These changes can be made while the CloudStack management server is running, and the changes can be seen immediately with […]

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CloudStack Support for XCP-ng

XCP-ng 8.2 LTS Support Added to CloudStack

The latest version of XCP-ng – the opensource hypervisor based on XenServer – XCP-ng 8.2 was released in November 2020, and is the first long term support (LTS) version. As such it will receive support and updates for the next 5 years compared to only a year for a standard XCP release. The hypervisor is getting more and more popular in the open-source world thanks to its modern and user-friendly UI, scalability, live migration capabilities and security level. XCP-ng 8.2 comes with a wide range of new capabilities including UEFI support, openflow controller access, native support for Gluster, ZFS, XFS, […]

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L2 Persistent Networks & enhancement of Isolated Persistent Networks

L2 Persistent Networks and enhancement of Isolated Persistent Networks | CloudStack Feature First Look

When a network is created in CloudStack, it is by default not provisioned until the first VM is deployed on that network, at which point a a VLAN ID is assigned. Until then, the network exists only as a database entry. If you wanted to create and provision a network without deploying any VMs, you would need to create a persistent network. With persistent networks, you can deploy physical devices like routers / switches, etc. without having to deploy VMs on it, as it provisions the network at the time of its creation. More information about persistent networks in CloudStack […]

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VMware Migration Improvements - CloudStack Feature First Look - Cover

VMware Migration Improvements | CloudStack Feature First Look

Migration of virtual machines between physical hosts or clusters is essential for cloud operators, allowing them to perform maintenance with little or no downtime, or balance compute and storage resources when necessary. CloudStack supports both live and cold migration (if supported by the hypervisor), and most hypervisors allow VM and volume migration in some form or another. VMware vMotion provides both live and cold migration of VM and volumes. By leveraging vMotion with the APIs migrateVirtualMachine, migrateVirtualMachineWithVolume, migrateSystemVm and migrateVolume, migration of user and system VMs and their volume(s) can be performed easily in CloudStack. However, until now CloudStack had […]

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Shared Networks - How to specify VR - CloudStack

Specify VR IP in Shared Networks | CloudStack Feature First Look

If you are a system engineer managing shared networks and deploying virtual machines with CloudStack, you should be aware that currently there is no option to assign a specific IP address for the Virtual Router. The router is assigned the first free IP address. For many engineers, this might be annoying, as you are not able to make the selection by yourself. Moreover, you would prefer to hold the inventory under control and select the IP address to be assigned by yourself. In this article, we present a new feature in CloudStack, which make the management of shared networks easier. […]

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Kubernetes Logo - CloudStack

CloudStack Kubernetes Service – Cluster Auto-scaling | CloudStack Feature First Look

Since the addition of CloudStack Kubernetes Service, users can deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters in CloudStack. This not only makes CloudStack a more versatile and multifaceted application, but also reduces the gap between virtualization and containerization. As with any step in the right direction, it came with a few challenges, and one of them was manual scaling of the cluster. Automating this process by monitoring cluster metrics may address this issue, but Kubernetes strongly advises against this. Instead, it is recommended that Kubernetes itself make these scaling decisions, and specifically for , Kubernetes has the ‘Cluster Autoscaler’ feature – a […]

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CloudStack VMWare Logos

Support Virtual Appliance OVA Templates in VMware | CloudStack Deep Dive

Vendors of virtual appliances (vApp) for VMware often produce ‘templates’ of their appliances in an OVA format. An OVA file will contain disc images, configuration data of the virtual appliance, and sometimes a EULA which must be acknowledged. The purpose of this feature is to enable CloudStack to mimic the end-user experience of importing such an OVA directly into vCenter, the end result being a virtual appliance deployed with the same configuration data in the virtual machines descriptor (VMX) file as would be there if the appliance had been deployed directly through vCenter. The OVA will contain configuration data regarding […]

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