On June 13th, StorPool had the honor and privilege to host and organize the European Cloud Infrastructure and CloudStack User Day together with its partner ShapeBlue. The event was a get together of the local IT infrastructure experts and CloudStack users. Main focus were talks presenting best practices and useful information on how to build an efficient public or private infrastructure. In addition, worlds leading experts and contributors to the open-source Apache CloudStack Project presented its latest functionalities and updates in the project.
What is CloudStack? Key features and use cases
CloudStack is a scalable cloud orchestration platform for delivering turnkey infrastructure as a service clouds. As it is relatively easy to deploy and manage, it attracts the attention of people considering which cloud management system to use. Firstly, its architecture is highly scalable and reliable. The most massive known production cloud with CloudStack installation was reaching approx. 35 000 physical hosts and was running smoothly. Secondly, CloudStack is hypervisor agnostic. It supports KVM, Xen, VMware, HyperV, OVM, etc. Moreover, it also presents a REST API and is used for cloud infrastructure as a service, containers as a service, and many more use cases in which enterprises need a reliable solution to manage complex infrastructure and virtualizations.
CloudStack supports different storage options, and StorPool has its CloudStack integration. More about the story of building StorPool’s CloudStack integration, you can read here.
CloudStack Market Growth
The European Cloud Infrastructure and CloudStack User Day started with a keynote session of Giles Sirett, CEO of ShapeBlue and widely recognized contributor to the Apache project. Giles talked us through the history of CloudStack, its main advantages, and the value it can bring to companies. After that, he made an overview of interesting use case and shared information for its releases and user communities. According to him, the most significant value of CloudStack is that it is a user-driven project and community, which makes it vibrant and rapidly developed. In conclusion, Giles also shared that CloudStack adoption is quickly growing and now it is used by some of the biggest companies globally.
Achieving the ultimate performance with KVM
Next to the stage was Boyan Krosnov, CPO of StorPool. In his session, he discussed a private cloud setup with KVM achieving 1M IOPS per hyper-converged (storage+compute) node. Besides, Boyan answered the question: What is the optimum architecture and configuration for performance and efficiency? His session was a deep technical dive into the ways for building an efficient and high-performance cloud infrastructure. Furthermore, Boyan explained why performance matters and how many companies even do not understand they are struggling with performance issues … until the moment their customers notify them for this.
During the presentation, the CPO of StorPool covered essential aspects of building cloud infrastructure, part of which were:
- why the same hardware can bring you 10 times better performance than before
- how hardware, compute and networking affect the performance
- tips and trick for getting ultimate KVM performance
- …and many more
Boyan advised all participants in the event to pay attention on their cloud performance, apply possible optimizations for accelerating it and closely monitor the cloud performance.
CloudStack: A Service Managers Perspective
After a short break, we welcomed Maria Barta from Itelligence Global Managed Services GmbH.
Maria presented a different perspective on CloudStack – “A Service Managers Perspective”. Agile business processes are becoming increasingly important in successful IT services. Itelligence GmbH, provides many different ultra-flexible and highly adaptable cloud solutions. To ensure customer/user satisfaction (i.e. availability, data security and product transparency) and simultaneously facilitate effective agile product development within their team, the role of the service manager is steadily evolving. As a conclusion, the talk provided an insight to the benefits and limitations of CloudStack in relation to the service manager objectives and Maria’s attempt to overcome these in her specific internal IaaS solution.
What’s new in CloudStack 4.13
Paul Angus, VP Technology of ShapeBlue and VP Technology of Apache. He was one of the most awaited speakers at the event. Mainly because he is the most experienced person in the community, who has exceptional knowledge in CloudStack. His session was focused on the new release of CloudStack. The 4.13 version is due for release this summer. With 100s of updates and new features, Paul went through user features. He also talked about operator features and integrations, demonstrating just how much work and development is going into CloudStack.
Paul also shared that version 4.14 omost probably will arrive at the end of 2019/beginning of 2020. He enjoyed great attention from the European CloudStack community and managed to give valuable pieces of advice to the admins dealing with complex cloud issues.
Challenges with high-density networks
Last, but not least, Marian Marinov from SiteGround web hosting company shared his experience in the problems when managing high-density networks. In cloud environments, people consider the network as a given and almost limitless resource. You get an interface and you are told its bandwidth capacity. From the perspective of the client, this is true. But from the perspective of the provider, this is far from the truth. In his talk, Marian took a look at some DataCenter network designs and what technologies/protocols were used to battle the problem with high-density clouds. All participants in the event had the chance to learn about VXLAN and “L3” switching.
After the final official talk, we managed to organize a great networking event between the speakers and the event attendees. One more opportunity to learn new things for cloud infrastructure and about building a cloud with StorPool and CloudStack.
For StorPool’s team, it was a pleasure to be host and co-organizer of the event and to put the beginning of a new CloudStack community in Bulgaria.
Our presenters’ slides can be found here:
Giles Sirett – CloudStack EU User Group 13 june 2019 – Sofia
Boyan Krosnov – Achieving the ultimate performance with KVM
Maria Barta – CS Day Sofia_ CS – A service manager perspective_20190613
Paul Angus – CSEUG19-What’s coming in CloudStack
Marian Marinov – Challenges with high-density networks