The city of Prague was the venue for the spring meeting of the Cloudstack European user group. There was a great turnout for the meeting and a first count showing 14 different nationalities represented; some people having travelled from as far as Ukraine, UK and France.
The event was kindly hosted by Interoute Czech.
There were 8 speakers on the day with a wide range of technical and user talks. Even the speakers reflected the true pan-european nature of this group with 6 different nationalities being represented.
Group Chairman Giles Sirett started proceedings. Giles gave a roundup of Cloudstack news, talking through recent releases 4.9.2 and the upcoming 4.10 release. He also told the group about the upcoming Cloudstack collaboration conference in Miami Giles was briefly joined by Wido den Hollander, the recently appointed Vice President of Apache CloudStack who introduced himself to the group and also encouraged them to come to Miami !
The first speaker was Alex Matteoli from Interoute, our hosts for the day. Interoute is the owner-operator of one of Europe’s largest networks and a global cloud services platform which 
encompasses 15 data centres, 17 Virtual Data Centres and 33 colocation centres, with connections to 195 additional third-party data centres across Europe. Alex fave an overview of how Interoute use Apache Cloudstack do deliver their hugely successfully VDC cloud service.
Their platform runs 17 zones, distributed across 3 continents, running workloads from some of the worlds largest companies. One of the most interesting aspects of Interoutes Cloudstack deployment is that they expose the native Cloudstack GUI (with a few modifications) to their users He briefly mentioned some of the exciting and innovative plans for new services that Interoute have.
Next up was Vladimir Melnik from Tucha Cloud Services in the Ukraine, another company running IaaS services on Apache Cloudstack. Vladimir is the original author and maintainer of Monkeyman, a perl5 framework for Apache CloudStack automation. Vladimir explained his original drivers for creating an object orientated interface to Cloudstack (which weren’t just that he prefers programming in perl to python). Monkeyman is open source and Valdimir is keen for others to try the tool and contribute to its ongoing maintenance.
Boris Stoyanov (Bobby to his friends) was the only talk of the day to include a quiz. Bobby, who describes himself as BreakerOfThings@shapeblue (he’s a Software Test Engineer) , was here to talk about the new dynamic roles functionality in CloudStack 4.9. But first he decided to test the audience’s knowledge of the existing fixed roles security model. The clear winner of the competition was Vladimir (who hadn’t yet sat down)
Cloudstack dynamic roles give a true RBAC layer to cloudstack, giving a fully flexible & granular approach to security. Bobby talked through the new functionality and how to migrated existing Cloudstack environments.
Next up was Mike Tutowski. Despite working for Netapp Solidfire, Mike spends most of his time working on Apache Cloudstack and is a PMC member of the project. Mike gave an overview of his work on cloudstack to allow it to support primary storage QOS. Mike decided that his talk should be 100% demo – which was interesting on the day but means we have nothing to show in this roundup. Shame
Paul Angus was next, giving a talk on CloudStack Container Service. Paul explained how this feature had started life as as an internal customer project at his company (ShapeBlue), evolved into an opensource external plugin and is in the process of being donated to the Cloudstack project. Cloudstack Container Service gives a framework for deploying container clusters in Cloudstack – with the first integration point being Kubernetes. Paul gave a great demo of provisioning Kubernetes clusters with just a few clicks in the Cloudstack UI and then deploying containerised apps into those clusters.
The Cloudstack European User Group is not just a technical forum. We really enjoy hearing sucess stories and how organisations are using Cloudstack in innovative ways. Martins Paurs from Telia Latvija came to tell us how his company have leveraged Cloudstack to help evolve their business from a traditional Telco business into a modern cloud providers.
As well as their own public IaaS offering, Telia Latvia now runs on Cloudstack their own internal workloads and services such as cloud-based surveillance, virtual desktops, backup and storage as a service. This has given them far greater agilty in bringing new service to market.
The final speaker of the day was Mark Wilson, also from Interoute. Interoute have recently migrated their VMware Cloudstack environment from standard vswitches to distributed Vswitches, giving them some massive performance enhancements across their IaaS environment. Mark explained his approach to this migration (mainly scripted in powershell), ran through a demo of how it all hung together.
As is always the case at CSEUUG, the day finished with a Q&A session in a local bar. Topics discussed included cloud storage, IPv6, Brexit and which nation consumes the most beer annually.
Many thanks to our speakers and to Interoute for kindly hosting us. The next User group meeting will be in June watch the LinkedIn Group for venue and dates
Giles is CEO and founder of ShapeBlue and is responsible for overall company strategy, strategic relationships, finance and sales.
He is also a committer and PMC member of the Apache CloudStack project and Chairman of the European Cloudstack User Group, actively helping promote brand awareness of the technology.
Giles can regularly be heard speaking at events around the globe, delivering visionary talks on cloud computing adoption and more specifically on Cloudstack technologies.
Before ShapeBlue, Giles held C-Level technology positions for 15 years including founder and CEO of Octavia Information Systems, a leading UK Managed Service Provider.
Giles holds a BSc in Engineering Physics from Sheffield Hallam University. Outside work, Giles is married with two teenage children. He coaches children’s rugby, is a competitive masters swimmer and can regularly be seen crying when his beloved Tottenham Hotspur lose.
