Head in the Clouds

Today Citrix announced that CloudStack would become the cloud platform project in Apache Software Foundation. I’m excited not just because CloudStack will be an incredibly vibrant and successful project by itself, I also believe there is a tremendous amount of synergy between CloudStack and other cloud-related projects in Apache Software Foundation. I look forward to continuing to work with, for example, Apache Libcloud and Deltacloud projects.

I am the most excited, however, about the prospect of integrating with Apache Hadoop project. Known primarily as the technology for Big Data applications, Hadoop has gained wide-spread adoption in the industry. Similar to CloudStack which is inspired by Amazon’s EC2 service, Hadoop is modeled after Google’s MapReduce and Google File System technologies. And just like CloudStack, Hadoop is implemented in Java.

At the lowest level, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a distributed and scalable file system. HDFS is designed to run on a large number of hosts and achieves reliability by automatically replicating data across multiple hosts. Hadoop project also includes a MapReduce engine and HBase distributed database (modeled after Google’s BigTable.) MapReduce and HBase run on top of HDFS. Highly reliable and highly efficient, Hadoop technology is being used by some of the largest cloud companies including eBay, Yahoo! and Facebook.

Today, CloudStack users already run Hadoop on CloudStack. They implement a service very similar to Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce (EMR). For cloud service providers, Hadoop represents a significant amount of workload that can be readily moved to the cloud. Enterprise deployments can achieve tremendous savings by leveraging the same CloudStack infrastructure to host Big Data workload. Users also leverage CloudStack’s bare metal provisioning capabilities to build high performance Hadoop clusters.

Working closely with Hadoop development community, we have started to explore other ways to integrate CloudStack and Hadoop. Because of its scalability, reliability, performance, and maturity, HDFS is a great object store solution for IaaS cloud. We have started the development of an S3 API front-end for HDFS. Once that work is complete, the combination of CloudStack and Hadoop will provide features equivalent to Amazon EC2 and S3 services.

When CloudStack was launched as an open source project back in 2010 our goal was to make CloudStack the leading open source cloud computing platform and to enable our users, partners, and customers to easily use, modify, and contribute to the project. We chose to license the project under the GNU Public License v3 (GPLv3) then.  The reasoning was that this was not only an OSI-approved license but also it allowed us to maintain compatibility with the Apache Software License. At the time it was the right move for the project... but times change.

Today we are announcing our move from the GPLv3 to the Apache License 2.0. We are also planning to apply contribute the CloudStack project to the Apache Software Foundation(ASF) and with their acceptance to turn CloudStack into a truly community run project but with governance provided by the Apache Foundation rather than by Citrix alone.  In addition, Citrix has stepped up its investment in the project and the open source community and decided to become a platinum sponsor of the Apache Foundation. They also will be hiring additional developers, evangelists and providing other resources to help insure the success of the CloudStack project in the long-term.

Why Switch Licenses?

Over the course of the last two years the feedback from our users and partners was that while the GPL was a fine license that it did throw up some roadblocks to their participation and use. Today Citrix has announced their intention to contribute the CloudStack code to the Apache foundation and to license CloudStack 3.0.1 and all future versions under the  Apache Software License.

This decision was not made lightly and frankly when the idea was floated I was a little skeptical as a fan of Linux I was fond of saying, “If the GPL is good enough for Linus, it’s good enough for me.” The problem is that I am only one person and while it was fine for me it was not the license that best served everyone in our community and put up barriers for others to participate.

The Citrix CloudStack engineering team is addressing issues with all deployed CloudStack instances.  The SSL certificate that is used by the console proxy VM, which provides guest console viewing access to tenants) will expire on 05:15:23 GMT on 7 February 2012.  When the certificate expires, users will get warnings/errors from their browsers when they attempt to view the console of their guest VMs.  Exact behavior is dependent on browser vendor, browser version, and user settings.

For public clouds, or clouds that have frequency console viewing, it is recommended to apply the patch described in this knowledge base article (http://docs.cloud.com/Knowledge_Base/Updating_the_SSL_certificate_for_realhostip_domain).  This patch should be applied before 05:15 GMT on 7 February.

For private clouds, or clouds that have a low use of the Console viewing feature, you can choose to not apply this fix and wait for 2.2.14 or 3.0.0.  You will still be able to use the guest consoles, but depending on your browser you will get an alert once the certificate expires.

Instructions for using your own SSL certificate are located at the bottom of the above KB article.

Today we announced CloudStack 2.2, the latest version of our open source cloud computing platform. This a huge leap forward for CloudStack with scads of new features and a noticeably improved user interface. CloudStack is available for immediate download from the...

Cloudstack Community Edition version 2.1.7 is now available.

Release notes are available here.

Download the latest releases on the community downloads page.

Some of the highlights of Cloudstack CE 2.1.7:

* The dashboard capacity view will...