Taking place on 14th-16th November 2022 in Sofia, Bulgaria, the CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2022 was a hybrid get-together for the global CloudStack community. The event hosted 370+ attendees from 32 countries and 48 speakers. The CloudStack Collaboration Conference impressed all its attendees with an agenda with 38 sessions and workshops from leading CloudStack experts, users and skilful engineers from the open-source world. These included: technical talks, user stories, new features and integration presentations and more.
ShapeBlue was excited to be part of the event and to support it as always. CCC 2022 was also sponsored by LINBIT, DIMSI, StorPool, Apiculus by IndiQus, StackBill, Stack Console, CLDIN and Hubilo.
In this article, we are sharing the event highlights including session recordings, slides and speaker information for anybody who could not make it. From an attendee perspective, we are excited to have had the opportunity to meet all the community members in-person, after a few years of virtual events. It was a great pleasure to watch and hold in-depth technical talks, and share insights and vision for the virtualization market with top experts from the community.
Day 1 Sessions:
Keynote talk: Apache CloudStack – Charting a Path for the Next 10 years and Beyond – Simon Weller
CloudStack since its inception has been a significant player in the cloud market, enabling service providers and enterprise customers to drive success, while controlling their own destinies. With the constant evolution of technology and rapidly changing market dynamics, join Simon as he reflects on an exciting 10 years of innovation and looks to the future.
About Simon Weller:
Simon Weller is the new VP of Apache CloudStack announced in late March 2022. Simon has been an Apache CloudStack PMC member for the last few years. He has a strong technology background in multiple competencies, including networking and systems.
What’s New In Apache CloudStack 4.17 – Nicolas Vazquez
4.17.0 is the latest Apache CloudStack major release. In this talk, Nicolas goes through the new features introduced in this version from an administrator/user perspective, explaining their benefits and the problems those features resolve. He also ran a live demo to see the new features in action.
About Nicolas Vazquez:
Nicolas Vazquez is a Senior Software Engineer at ShapeBlue and is a PMC member of the Apache CloudStack project. He spends his time designing and implementing features in Apache CloudStack and can be seen acting as a release manager also. Nicolas is based in Uruguay and is a father of a young girl. He is a fan of sports, enjoys playing tennis and football. In his free time, he also enjoys reading and listening to economic and political materials.
cloud-init: How Does It Really Work? – Wido den Hollander
cloud-init is the standard for provisioning Virtual Machines in almost all cloud platforms. CloudStack is supported as a DataSource in cloud-init. How does this process actually work and how does this data magically provision the virtual machine? Find out by watching this talk!
New Networking Capabilities In ACS And How To Leverage Them For VNF Deployments – Alexandre Mattioli
Several new networking capabilities such as IPv6 support, fully routed Virtual Router, user-driven shared networks and others have been added to CloudStack since its 4.17 release. In this talk, Alex looks at how to use these new capabilities together in order to seamlessly enable the deployment of Virtual Network Functions via ACS.
StackBill is a complete self-service intuitive Cloud Management Portal with extensive features leveraging Apache CloudStack® with state of the art tools and years of expertise. Stackbill helps datacenter and cloud providers to build their own public cloud business powered by Apache Cloudstack.
In this workshop session, Amal Ranjith talks about how StackBill offers a great solution for cloud service providers with simplified user experience and packed with 3’rd party plugins to provide users with a live demo.
About Amal Ranjith:
A Big fan of Linux – enjoyed working with server round the clock. A Techie with 25 Years of experience, Co-founder of Assistanz Networks Pvt. Ltd. and logged in over 10,000+ servers for helping clients, teams, datacenters, web hosts and enterprise companies. Less expressive and more action-oriented in nature co-founded FogPanel which was acquired in 2015. Now working on a mission to make StackBill – one of the most preferred CMP by 2025. Founder of StackWatch – an AI-based server monitoring system. Towards his hobby over innovative cosmetics and Fragrance oils. Founded GlamBella – a company producing and trading cosmetics and fragrance oils.
VM Autoscaling With CloudStack VR As Network Provider – Wei Zhou
In this talk, Wei looks at the new VM autoscaling functionality in CloudStack (due for the 4.18 release) that gives VM autoscaling without relying on any external devices.
About Abhishek Kumar:
Abhishek Kumar is a committer of the Apache CloudStack project and has worked on the notable features such as VM ingestion, CloudStack Kubernetes Service, IPv6 support, etc. He works as a Software Engineer at ShapeBlue.
How To Monetise & Bill CloudStack – A Practical Open Approach – K B Shiv Kumar
This talk is for ISPs looking to bill CloudStack resources, and for software developers looking to build a billing solution around CloudStack. This talk looks at covering multiple business and technical use cases (for example: plans, catalogues, flexible billing, tiered offerings, account management, etc.) for running a public cloud and how the same can be achieved using CloudStack. It does not delve into any specific billing system but instead focuses on an open approach to how ACS features can be leveraged to implement billing and monetise CloudStack.
About K B Shiv Kumar:
Shiv is the Co-Founder and CTO of IndiQus Technologies Pvt. Ltd. and a CloudStack user turned evangelist since 2013. He loves tinkering on CloudStack and the possibilities it offers. He has deployed multiple public and private clouds running CloudStack in the South Asian region and has also integrated legacy systems with CloudStack. He would love to share his experiences with like-minded professionals.
Choosing A Kubernetes Integration Technology That’s Right For You – David Jumani
Apache CloudStack has two different ways of integrating with Kubernetes:
– The CloudStack Kubernetes services
– The CloudStack Cluster API provider (CAPI)
In this talk, David compares the two different technologies, their use cases and their approach. He goes into detail on the architecture of each approach and what drove their development.
About David Jumani:
The Best Storage Solution For CloudStack: LINSTOR – Yusuf Yıldız
This session was an interactive session on extending Apache CloudStack with LINSTOR. LINSTOR is Open source Software Defined Storage designed to manage block storage devices for large clusters. The unique structure of LINSTOR helps you overcome countless roadblocks when you want to set up reliable storage. This demo covered; The steps to building a reliable and high-performance SDS for your CloudStack environment, The benefits of the stack Comparing LINSTOR with other SDS offerings – what you should know.
Amazon EKS Anywhere is a deployment option for Amazon EKS that enables customers to create and operate Kubernetes clusters on customer-managed infrastructure, supported by AWS. Customers can already run Amazon EKS Anywhere on their own on-premises infrastructure on bare metal servers or using VMware vSphere. In this session, you will learn about the Cluster API provider for Apache CloudStack, and how customers can now create and operate Amazon EKS Anywhere clusters on Apache CloudStack environments on-premises.
Vipin Mohan is a Principal Product Manager in the Kubernetes team at Amazon Web Services. He enjoys building products and delivering delightful customer experiences. Outside of work, he loves reading about financial investing and entrepreneurship and exploring the world through the eyes of his two kids.
Day 2 Sessions:
Empowering Digital India With CloudStack – Abhishek Ranjan
CSC E-Governance India is leading the game in bringing G2C & B2C services across the nation on a digital marketplace that enables citizens to avail services from the comfort of their neighbourhood kiosk called Common Service Centers. The digital platform enables and empowers the lives of millions of Indians to access services in the modern digital world. In this talk, Abhishek shares insights on how CSC harnesses the power of CloudStack to underpin the services delivery and build a government community cloud for powering applications which aid in building a digitally inclusive ecosystem.
About Abhishek Ranjan:
Abhishek is the CTO with CSC e-Governance Services India a special purpose vehicle under the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Govt of India. He runs the technology behind CSC which drives the world’s largest front end service delivery points to deliver government & business services across the nation reaching the remotest of the country on a digital format. CSC’s Digital platform supports multi domain products & services ranging from government, business, aadhaar, insurance, travel, education, utilities, bill payments, fintech apps for banking services delivery. Prior to CSC he worked with the UIDAI, where he was engaged as member of the technology team that built Aadhaar, during his Aadhaar days he was involved in building the Aadhaar Biometric Attendance system, Digital Life Certificate & several other exciting and challenging projects which were widely adopted across the nation. He previously did his bachelors in engineering from BITS Mesra and passionately participates in Application Architecture, Product Design & Development, Big Data Analysis and specializes in Product Strategy, Strategic Tech Planning & Technology Leadership.
VM Console Enhancements – Nicolas Vazquez
In this talk, Nicolas introduces a new model for console access to instances in CloudStack. He explains both “how” and “why” CloudStack has moved from an embedded HTML client iframe to an API-driven generated console. He also delves into recent enhancements to the security and access to the console, including an extra security client validation approach.
About Nicolas Vazquez:
Nicolas Vazquez is a Senior Software Engineer at ShapeBlue and is a PMC member of the Apache CloudStack project. He spends his time designing and implementing features in Apache CloudStack and can be seen acting as a release manager also. Nicolas is based in Uruguay and is a father of a young girl. He is a fan of sports, enjoys playing tennis and football. In his free time, he also enjoys reading and listening to economic and political materials.
Providing Microsoft Azure Functions And Microsoft Dataverse Resources With CloudStack – Quentin Roccia, Christophe Gondouin, Pierre Charton
Many business projects (CRM, ERP, etc) are using proprietary cloud solutions that may be available outside these major clouds. Christophe, Pierre and Quentin will demonstrate the possibilities to use Apache Cloudstack when working on the Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Dataverse world, providing the same features on an open-source cloud solution.
About the speakers:
Christophe Senior code and platform architect, DIMSI partner, Christophe is helping all technical teams to choose best patterns and implementations to deliver fast, reliable and clean software solutions When not trashing and re-coding software developed by our team, you may find him playing with his 2 children, drinking beers with his friends or on his computer watching Series
Pierre Senior back-end developer, Pierre is in charge of Backroll integration inside Cloudstack. Pierre has a proven track record of successful c# and Java projects. When not playing with his keyboard, Pierre is surfing, WingFoiling or bodyboarding on the Brittany coast.
Quentin Senior DevOps engineer & Cloud enabler, DIMSI partner Quentin is in charge of DIMSI custom developments on Apache Cloudstack deployment : customer portal, backup solution. On a daily basis, he helps our customers and our developers to use and embrace Devops methodology, by building CI/CD pipelines (GitLab, Azure Devops), dockerizing apps and automate things as much as possible… When not DevOps’ing, Quentin loves to binge watch series and movies, play with his cat “Boogie” and is a crazy fan of street food.
Our Journey Developing Kubernetes CAPI Provider For Apache CloudStack – David Jumani
The Kubernetes Cluster API (CAPI) sub-project aims to simplify and unify the Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management. With almost a dozen provider implementations, we decided to add our own provider implementation for Apache CloudStack. But how simple was it? With several CRDs, controllers, API versions, and even experimental features, and e2e tests to develop, it’s easy to get lost in the details and can seem quite overwhelming. Join us to discover how we did it! We detail our journey, from building an initial prototype over a weekend to a full-fledged, production-ready application, and deployed in an environment with over 10s of 1000s of hosts! We share the pitfalls, hacks, learnings, and key takeaways from our journey to develop CAPC – the CAPI Provider for Apache CloudStack.
About David Jumani:
David is a CloudStack committer, member of the Kubernetes Org and Software Engineer at ShapeBlue.
CloudStack At NTT DATA Business Solutions – Andre Walter
Learn more about the Implementation and use of Apache CloudStack at NTT DATA Business Solutions GMS.
About Andre Walter:
Andre Walter has been with NTT DATA for 10 years now, previously engaged at SAP focusing on Software on Demand Solutions and bringing it into production. He leads Cloud Infrastructure Services, which runs 24×7 Infrastructure Services & Data Center operations globally and has been implementing CloudStack successfully since 2014. When not at work, you might see him training for a Marathon.
Volume Encryption In CloudStack – Vladimir Petrov
In this talk, Vladi looks at the new Volume encryption option (due in CloudStack 4.18). He presents the new ability to use encrypted root and data volumes on different storage types, the benefits and the current limitations of the implementation.
About the speakers:
Slavka Peleva is a software developer at StorPool Storage and has been a passionate CloudStack Commiter since 2021. She is part of the CloudStack community and is excited to work on new features and capabilities to improve the open-source cloud management solution. At StorPool Slavka is responsible for the product integration with Cloudstack and is working on its native implementation in the technology. With her dedication and efforts in creating the StorPool’s plugin for CloudStack, companies can build reliable and speedy storage that is powered by the two technologies.
Venko Moyankov is the Solutions Lead at StorPool Storage, a fully managed data storage solution that transforms commodity hardware into a shared, powerful, highly available, and reliable storage system. He has experience with managing large virtualizations, working in telcos, designing and supporting the infrastructure of large enterprises. In the last year his focus has been in helping companies globally to build the best storage solution according to their needs and projects.
Alex Ivanov is the Product Lead at StorPool Storage and is responsible for the product strategy and tactics at the company. He has experience in the storage market and a deep understanding of the needs and priorities of businesses managing large-scale clouds to run diverse, mission-critical workloads. At StorPool, he works closely with the team to evolve the StorPool primary storage platform and expand its capabilities and usefulness for various use cases. His goal – ensure StorPool cost-effectively delivers above and beyond what is possible with other primary storage products to help customers achieve their commercial and technical goals.
Backroll: Production Grade KVM Backup Solution Integrated in CloudStack – Grégoire Lamodière, Quentin Roccia, Pierre Charton
Backroll is not only a production-grade KVM backup solution. It is also being integrated inside Apache Cloudstack using the Backup and restore framework. Pierre and Quentin show how it works, the feature list, and how the integration has been made.
Quentin is in charge of DIMSI custom developments on Apache Cloudstack deployment : customer portal, backup solution. On a daily basis, he helps our customers and our developers to use and embrace Devops methodology, by building CI/CD pipelines (GitLab, Azure Devops), dockerizing apps and automate things as much as possible… When not DevOps’ing, Quentin loves to binge watch series and movies, play with his cat “Boogie” and is a crazy fan of street food.
Pierre is in charge of Backroll integration inside Cloudstack. Pierre has a proven track record of successful c# and Java projects. When not playing with his keyboard, Pierre is surfing, WingFoiling or bodyboarding on Brittany coast.
About Daan Hoogland:
Daan Hoogland has been a software developer in about all roles available in the field, starting in 1991. Provisioning has been a recurring theme in his carreer. Functional design, Programming, Testing and also Functional Management and Operations, have been his main responsibilities over the years. At present He works as a software engineer at Shapeblue Ltd. and as a Technical Official at World Triathlon and the NTB (Dutch triathlon organisation) and is a Pilates – and Triathlon trainer.
10x Your Cloud Business With Stack Console & CloudStack – Saurabh Rapatwar
Every cloud service provider wants to boost their sales, but how? With the help of Stack Console’s reseller management module and CloudStack, a data center or cloud service provider can build resellers/partners and provide them with an automated white-label cloud management platform so they can sell cloud services under their own brand, such as compute, Kubernetes, load balancer, block storage, and so on. Many of resellers are likely to be small and medium-sized businesses that want to get into the cloud market, so this is great news for them. Service providers will still make money whether a customer buys a service directly from them or through one of their resellers.
About Venko Moyankov:
Venko Moyankov is a solution architect at StorPool Storage. He has experience with managing large virtualizations, working in telcos, designing and supporting the infrastructure of large enterprises. In the last year his focus has been in helping companies globally to build the best storage solution according to their needs and projects.
The Curious Case Of Cloud Repatriation – Sunando Bhattacharya
In this session, we examine how enterprises are realising that Hyperscaler clouds are not the best solution for all their cloud needs and are now repatriating a large part of their workloads to various private cloud platforms. We also examine how CloudStack is best placed to address the needs of these enterprises.
Day 3 Sessions:
What’s Coming In CloudStack 4.18 – Boris Stoyanov
A first look at some of the work-in-progress features due in the upcoming CloudStack 4.18 release.
About Boris Stoyanov:
Boris is a committer and PMC at Apache CloudStack also works at ShapeBlue and is devoted to testing CloudStack.
Beating The Hyperscalers With A High-performance, Cost-efficient Cloud With Apiculus And StorPool – Alex Ivanov, Sunando Bhattacharya, Kshitish Purohit
Setting up and operating a public cloud that is not only hyperscale-grade, but can actually beat the hyperscalers, requires a unique combination of a high-performance, cost-efficient and UX-first approach. In this workshop, IndiQus and StorPool showcase how the Apiculus and StorPool solutions, together with CloudStack, can create that winning formula for local, domestic and regional cloud providers.
About the speakers:
Alex Ivanov, Product Lead at StorPool Storage Alex Ivanov is the Product Lead at StorPool Storage and is responsible for the product strategy and tactics at the company. He has experience in the storage market and a deep understanding of the needs and priorities of businesses managing large-scale clouds to run diverse, mission-critical workloads. At StorPool, he works closely with the team to evolve the StorPool primary storage platform and expand its capabilities and usefulness for various use cases. His goal – ensure StorPool cost-effectively delivers above and beyond what is possible with other primary storage products to help customers achieve their commercial and technical goals. Venko Moyankov, Solutions Architect at StorPool Storage Venko Moyankov is the Solutions Lead at StorPool Storage, a fully managed data storage solution that transforms commodity hardware into a shared, powerful, highly available, and reliable storage system. He has experience with managing large virtualizations, working in telcos, designing and supporting the infrastructure of large enterprises. In the last year his focus has been in helping companies globally to build the best storage solution according to their needs and projects.
Sunando is the Co-Founder and CEO at IndiQus Technologies. With over 20 years of experience in the internet, telecom and cloud domains, Sunando drives the overall business vision at IndiQus. Outside of work, Sunando is a motorcycle enthusiast who rides along the highways and high mountain roads of India.
Kshitish is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at IndiQus. Kshitish has over 15 years of experience in the user experience, product management and startup domains, and has been an entrepreneur for all his career. Kshitish is also a trail and mountain athlete, and can be found exploring and mapping new trails, or running a mountain race, when not working.
UI Test Cases With CloudStack – Magali Pervan, Navid Abdoul
Each Cloudstack update is a critical process to prevent production issues. At DIMSI, we aim to reduce downtimes and regressions as much as possible for our end users. We are now implementing automated UI Tests to cover all main use cases whenever a new release is published. Navid and Magali give an overview of how it is being done, and the next steps, including potential integration inside the code project.
Navid Abdoul – Junior platform engineer, Navid joined DIMSI last summer to help us provide maximum performance and uptime to our customers He is dedicated to guaranteeing fast and reliable customer VM’s backup When not playing with video games, Navid is watching action movies.
Using AI To Place VMs On Hypervisors – Sina Kashipazha
CloudStack’s VM placement policies don’t fit the current need of the industry. We have to create external tools to load balance VMs on hosts. We have an idea (which is under heavy development) to implement an AI algorithm to manage VM placement on a host. The algorithm is triggered based on a criteria (like when there is no place for a VM with 64G Ram and 32 core), which results in changing the placement of the VMs on a system.
About Sina Kashipazha:
My name is Sina, I’m a software engineer with a passion for distributed applications, computer networks, and the cloud. To turn my passion into a career, I joined Computer Network Lab at my university as a research assistant and developed various network and cloud tools. After that, I joined the LeaseWeb company to expand my knowledge of complex production cloud environments. Currently, I am the Software Engineer in the CloudStack team of LeaseWeb. I’m responsible for all the infrastructure and management tasks for our public and private cloud, which runs in 8 regions in 7 different countries on 3 different continents.
Upgrading From Rovius CloudPlatform to Apache CloudStack – Andrija Panic
As many organizations prefer the freedom of open-source Apache CloudStack to commercial distributions, the need to migrate seamlessly to CloudStack is increasing. In this practical, demo-led talk, Andrija will look at the steps required to make a reliable migration from Accelerite’s Rovius Cloud platform to Apache CloudStack.
About Andrija Panic:
Andrija Panic is a Cloud Architect at ShapeBlue, the Cloud Specialists, and is a committer and PMC member of Apache CloudStack. Andrija spends most of his time designing and implementing IaaS solutions based on Apache CloudStack.
Next-Gen Virtual Routers And Zero Downtime Upgrades – Rohit Yadav
CloudStack 4.17 finally reached a point where upgrades can be performed with zero network downtime. In this talk, Rohit:
– looks at the history of CloudStack virtual router upgrades and how they have evolved towards this point
– looks in detail at the new “Live patching” functionality in CloudStack 4.17 which enables zero downtime upgrades
– discusses the limitations of the new functionality
– demo’s the new upgrade process
The talk also discusses the design and implementation of other recent changes in the virtual router, such as:
– systemvmtemplate improvements
– turn-key bundling of systemvmtemplates for automatic setup and upgrades
– deprecation of systemvm.iso
And discusses the future roadmap of VR and related next-gen networking features, the new VR agent and further improvements.
About Rohit Yadav:
Rohit Yadav is a committer and PMC member of Apache CloudStack project, and oversees the Software Engineering function at ShapeBlue, providing leadership and mentorship to our ever-growing Engineering Team.
News And Development Update Of The CloudStack Tungsten Fabric SDN Plug-in – Sven Vogel, Huy Le Minh
This talk involved a demo of the Tungsten Fabric Plugin and details what the important features are.
About Sven Vogel:
Sven Vogel is a German IT-Specialist with 15+ years experience in IT and member of the Apache Software Foundation. Before he got invited to join the mother foundation, he has been the Chairman / VP of Apache Cloudstack and an active Committer for a few years. He is well-known for driving various projects and supporting everyone who needs technological exchange, advise or upskilling. His interest in cloud-technologies is both – his professional and personal passion and he looks forward meeting you to talk about why system-relevant institutions need our help as open source technologists.
Adding New Data Sources And Resources To CloudStack Terraform Provider – Daman Arora
As of today, CloudStack-Terraform Provider v0.4.0 supports 25 resource types, and 1 data source type. It is the first release of CloudStack’s own provider, named CloudStack-Terraform Provider. The following link provides a complete list of Resources and Data Sources: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/cloudstack/cloudstack/latest/docs I am a GSoC contributor for 2022 and am extending the list of Terraform Data Sources and Resources offered by CloudStack Terraform. I am currently working on the following project: CloudStack Terraform Provider – Add datasources for the existing resources https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2022/projects/ZVraist1 I would like to present a tutorial/workshop as a knowledge transfer session. As CloudStack continues to grow in terms of resources, an explanation of how to extend Terraform provider will be beneficial to anyone who is interested in this area. In addition, I will share technical details regarding the provider during the presentation.
About the speakers:
Will Stevens is CloudOps’ CTO and has been involved in CloudStack for many years. He was much more active in previous years, as the ACS VP and release manager, and still remains on the PMC.
Daniel Murray is a Developer at CloudOps and is focused on the CloudMC product. He has worked on the integration between Apache CloudStack and CloudMC.
StackBill – Simplified Cloud Management Platform – Rafi Md
In this talk, Rafi shares the vision of StackBill and how they simplified cloud management with Apache Cloudstack. Key challenges of Datacenters on becoming a Cloud Datacenter and how stackbill solves it. New Features of StackBill added 2022 which would help datacenter, enterprises and telcos on measuring and maximizing their business.
Rafi joined Assistanz Networks Pvt. Ltd. as a Sales Associate in 2005 and is now serving as a Marketing Director at Assistanz. Founder – Inway Communications (www.Inway.in) serving PAN India since 2008 and India’s First Certified Guerrilla Marketer & Coach, Digital Marketer & Certified Trainer. Head of Global Marketing of StackBill.com – A Cloud Management Platform.
While serving Assistanz – assisted Datacenters over USA, UK, Switzerland, UAE, Australia, Italy and Canada on their Sales, Marketing & operations from India. Had done various projects for Corporate in advance strategies of Online Marketing, Sales and marketing automation. Completely passionate about Domains, Websites and Online Marketing.
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.
