Veröffentlicht am 17. March 2023
Why we chose Apache CloudStack and how it helps in customer projects
Berlin – 17.03.2022
Stephan Bienek
Head of Hosting
We rely on open source wherever possible. Even if it means a little more effort at the beginning, we are convinced that the advantages of open source outweigh the disadvantages in the long run. Open source is a true and transparent give and take, combined with a lot of passion from the community.
Why we chose Apache CloudStack and how it supports us in customer projects can be read below?
To build our weSystems Cloud, we were looking for the best tool to support us and our vision. Numerous requirements for the new software were also driven by customer projects.
During the evaluation process, we often felt we had to adapt our vision to the tool or reinvent the wheel. For us, it was and is important that we feel inspired by the tool. As soon as a new challenge arises, the possibilities of the software should inspire us to immediately think about solutions and motivate us to try out combining functions to create new solutions.
For us and our customers, we wanted to build a multi-tenant IaaS platform that supports a wide range of different workloads.
What else should the new platform be able to do?
✅ Support for multiple zones
✅ Provide multi-tenant IaaS capabilities.
✅ Support for the provision of managed services to our customers.
✅ Integration of the Kubernetes ecosystem
✅ Support for Ceph Storage
✅ Support for building and operating hybrid solutions that combine components within the virtualisation platform and components outside the virtualisation platform in Layer 2 and Layer 3 scenarios.
✅ Possibilities for creating customer-specific service offerings
✅ And crucially: clarity
Apache CloudStack has far outperformed other options evaluated, such as OpenStack, Proxmox and VMware.
We therefore chose CloudStack as the primary infrastructure for the development of our customer-facing services, i.e. our IaaS cloud offering as well as our managed hosting and managed application offerings. The functionality offered by CloudStack most closely matched our requirements in terms of virtual server management, networking capabilities and multi-tenancy. The rich feature set in computing, networking and UI/API, the flexibility to combine features that meet new requirements, while maintaining ease of use and usability, is the perfect mix for us.
In particular, the wide range of virtual network types and functions allows us and our customers to create complex virtual and hybrid solutions that target very specific and unique challenges.
Ultimately, we were convinced by the ability to use standard virtual machines and highly customised virtual machines at the same time. Especially for use cases like GPU-based render streaming platforms.
The workloads we run on CloudStack range from classic web server farms, Kubernetes clusters and build servers to latency-critical managed VoIP, contact centre and collaboration solutions, as well as managed monitoring solutions and demanding GPU-powered render streaming clusters. All of these workloads have specific requirements and demand a robust yet flexible infrastructure.
We run all VMs on KVM hypervisors in combination with Ceph storages in geographically separated zones in Europe. All components communicate via our fully redundant VXLAN-based network infrastructure.
We are very happy with the possibilities that CloudStack offers for dealing with new, unexpected challenges. So far, we have always been able to find a way to combine existing features to find solutions for new requirements. This is great because Apache CloudStack integrates tightly and smoothly with most of our technology stack components, reducing operational risk and building trust in the platform across teams.
The ability to combine CloudStack virtual resources with non-CloudStack physical and virtual resources in one platform allows us to build unique solutions that meet the unique needs and challenges of our customers today and tomorrow.
Advantages of Apache CloudStack
✅ All IaaS services on a single reliable software platform.
✅ Support for numerous hypervisors & virtualisation platforms.
✅ Suitable for private cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud
✅ Easy orchestration of infrastructure components
✅ Clear GUI for administrators & users
✅ Automation of many tasks possible
✅ Freely available open source software
✅ Project-based billing
✅ Integrated high availability
✅ Fully scalable
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