CloudStack forms the foundation for infrastructure clouds and data center operators can quickly and easily build cloud services within their existing infrastructure to offer on-demand, elastic cloud services. CloudStack users can take full advantage of cloud computing to deliver higher efficiency, limitless scale and faster deployment of new services and systems to the end-user. CloudStack will allow user to coordinate virtualized servers, networking and network storage to provide infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) just like hosting providers but on their own hardware. 

CloudStack is an open source cloud operating system which delivers public cloud computing similar to Amazon EC2 but using your own hardware. CloudStack provides orchestration of your virtualized resources into one homogeneous environment where you can delegate the creation to users of the virtual machines using the self-service CloudStack portal.

CloudStack provides powerful features for enabling a secure multi-tenant cloud computing environment. With one click virtual servers can be deployed from a pre-defined template. Virtualized instances can be shutdown, paused and restarted via the web interface, the command line or buy calling the extensive CloudStack API.

CloudStack can also be used for multiple purposes:

• Service Providers can offer virtualized hosting in an elastic cloud computing configuration
• Enterprises can stage development, testing and production in a consistent way easing the development and publishing processes for applications
• Web content providers can deploy scalable, elastic web infrastructure that can adapt to meet the demand of their readership
• Software-as-a-Service providers can offer true multi-tenant software hosting while securing each user's environments

All these capabilities are a result of years of development and collaboration by the Cloudstack development team with cloud computing users to deploy some of the largest, most scalable private and public  cloud computing environments in the world.

For a full list of features see our complete features list:

Key Features 

This is a summary of CloudStack's features, click on the images to see a full size shot of the Cloudstack feature as it is implemented in the CloudStack web interface.

• One Cloud, Multiple Hypervisors - With CloudStack, a single cloud deployment can run multiple hypervisor implementations of multiple types. Based on a pluggable architecture, CloudStack software works with a variety of hypervisors including Oracle VM, KVM, vSphere and Citrix XenServer to give customers complete freedom to choose the right hypervisor for their workload.
• Massively scalable infrastructure management - CloudStack lets you manage tens of thousands of servers across geographically distributed datacenters through a linearly scalable, centralized management server that eliminates the need for intermediate cluster-level management servers. No single component failure can cause cluster or cloud-wide outage, enabling downtime-free management server maintenance and reducing the workload of managing a large-scale cloud deployment.
• Easy-To-Use Web Interface - CloudStack makes it simple to manage your cloud infrastructure with a feature-rich user interface implemented on top of the CloudStack API. Fully AJAX-based and compatible with most popular web browsers, the solution can be easily integrated with your existing portal for seamless administration. A real-time view of the aggregated storage, IP pools, CPU, memory and other resources in use gives you better visibility and control over your cloud.
• Robust RESTful API - CloudStack implements industry-standard APIs on top of a low-level CloudStack API with its own unique and innovative features. Although the CloudStack API is documented, maintained and supported, CloudStack does not assert it as your only option—work is underway to create API adapters that implement Amazon EC2/S3 API and the vCloud API on top of the CloudStack API. Future cloud API standards from bodies such as DMTF will be implemented as they become available.

Benefits

• Empower users to “serve themselves”— removing IT from the critical path of the service delivery
• Automate previously labour intensive tasks, helping to reduce IT operation costs and deliver faster
• Reduces complexity and variability by using standard workloads which ensures consistency with each application and service deployment
• Retains visibility into resource allocation and line of business usage on a real-time level
• Increased server/admin ratio and delivers benefits of scale— even if deployed globally