It’s a tumultuous time for digital infrastructure. From the emergence of controversial new licensing models (and their accompanying price hikes) to the failure of hyperscalers to make good on promises of cost savings, many consumers are scrambling to find cost-effective, compliant, stable, and secure cloud servicing options.
But there’s good news.
Against this confused and unclear background, Apache CloudStack is proving itself ideally positioned to support.
Apache CloudStack: Cutting Through Complexity
Apache CloudStack (ACS), often referred to simply as CloudStack, is a platform that has been supporting businesses and services providers as an open-source project since 2010. CloudStack has a long history of providing quality infrastructure orchestration, supporting many of the most common vendor offerings, enabling a provider the ability to deliver services to their customers through a comprehensive solution to meet the specific needs of a diverse set of use cases.
Flexibility is a must.
As an infrastructure orchestrator, CloudStack provides a consistent platform and API for managing all aspects of the computing stack, including compute, storage and networking. CloudStack supports multiple hypervisors, with VMware and KVM being two of the most popular, allowing your business to prioritize what is most important for your use case. As most readers will appreciate, the orchestration of simple VMs is not sufficient to support the extent of a customer’s expectations. The ability to provide suitable storage solutions to meet different use cases, such as machine learning or long-term backups, require different underlying implementations and architectures. CloudStack provides a wide range of integrations and supported protocols to meet the varied storage needs of different customer use cases.
Additionally, a VM provides limited value without a network to make the workloads accessible to their target audience. CloudStack provides an extensive set of virtual networking capabilities, orchestrating both private and public IP space as well as different network topologies and vendor solutions. Standard network concepts like firewall rules, port forwarding and VPNs are all supported. Additionally, many concepts are supported to provide high performance networks through dedicated hardware configured within the datacenter.
Simpler is better.
One of the key and unique features of CloudStack is the ability to abstract away the underlying implementation from the user’s experience with the service. This allows providers the flexibility to leverage the vendors and relationships they have without exposing those details to their users. This is especially important as things change within the market and new vendors or topologies are introduced into a provider’s ecosystem.
An example of market shifts which CloudStack has been effective in supporting providers through is the recent VMware license changes after the purchase by Broadcom. Many organizations have been forced to re-evaluate the value for money of their VMware deployments, and the ability to transition to another platform has left a lot of organizations with complicated business and technical decisions. CloudStack is helping organizations with these challenging decisions by providing supported migration paths between different hypervisors.
For example, CloudStack supports the migration of workloads from VMware deployments to KVM. CloudStack also supports the ability for VMware workloads to be transitioned under the CloudStack management umbrella so a future decision could be made. This allows for providers to transition all or part of their workloads to a different hypervisor, like KVM, over time as required. It also allows for the provider to offer different offerings which are backed by different hypervisors based on their customer’s needs and budget.
CloudOps: Making the Most of CloudStack
At Aptum, we have also appreciated CloudStack’s ability to support many different architectures and topologies, enabling providers to establish a best fit solution to their customer’s needs. We have developed a CloudOps Software service which supports the productization and monetization of CloudStack, along with other orchestration platforms. CloudOps Software was developed to support service providers get the most out of their CloudStack investments by giving them tools to monetize their customer’s usage in many interesting and compelling ways.
With features such as multi-level multi-tenancy, with support for resellers and branding being built in, the CloudOps Software solution provides endless go-to-market opportunities. Similar to how CloudStack is able to abstract away the infrastructure concepts from the user’s experience, CloudOps Software is able to abstract away the underlying service’s tenant implementation with its extensive role-based access control (RBAC) and provider management.
Business needs and technical requirements: two sides of the same coin.
The combination of Apache CloudStack to abstract away the technical complexity and Aptum’s CloudOps Software to deliver business value through its productization and monetization engine creates new efficiencies for tech leaders. Together, they enable Services providers to own their destiny in delivering against the technical needs of their customers, while ensuring a strong business model is maintained.
Struggling with cloud complexity? Let’s chat about it!
If navigating cloud complexity has you looking for practical solutions, our specialists at Aptum are here to help. We’d love to hear your story and explore how CloudOps Software can streamline your deployments, simplify scaling, and unlock new growth opportunities for your cloud offerings.
About the Author
Will Stevens, CTO at Aptum, leads the development of software-defined cloud solutions with a focus on CloudOps software. A long-time contributor to the CloudStack community, Will has served as a developer, release manager, PMC member, and Vice President. With extensive experience helping global organizations adopt cloud and DevOps practices, he brings a strong focus on both technical innovation and user experience.
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