Head in the Clouds

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.

With CloudStack Acton now released, there's precious little time to stop and rest. Instead, we are already rapidly working on the next CloudStack release, codenamed Bonita.


As part of this release we are making a concerted effort to make the entire CloudStack development process far more transparent and inclusive. I do ask that you be patient with us in this process, the level of cultural change is massive. The first step is to at least let folks know what's going on - and Haroon (The project manager for the project) will be posting meeting minutes, status updates, etc. on the cloudstack-devel mailing list. Once we have communication down we'll work on making things far more inclusive and participatory.

So for Bonita - the status from a PM view will be here:
http://confluence.cloudstack.org/display/RelOps/Bonita

You'll also note that Haroon has published meeting minutes from the few meetings that have occurred; for instance you can see Bonita Kick Off Meeting:
http://confluence.cloudstack.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1344273

We welcome your participation as we start work on this release.

After many months of hard work and long weekend hours, we are finally releasing the Acton release.

This is the first major CloudStack release since our 2.2.x series and it includes many new features such as:

- - Network as a Service
- - Projects
- - LDAP Support
- - Openstack Swift Support
- - Netscaler MPX/VPX/SDX Support
- - vSphere 5.0 Support
- - XenServer 6.0 Support
- - Brand spanking new User Interface
- - and many others

I want to take a moment and thank the community for all of their help. The beta process resulted in hundreds of community discovered and reported bugs. This release also had a far greater level of non-Citrix contribution, from bug fixes and even some major feature contribution.

You can find the binaries here: http://bit.ly/x2svsr

One of the most powerful but lesser known features of CloudStack is it's ability to integrate with networking devices like F5 and NetScaler loadbalancers. 

With CloudStack 3.0 you can deploy NetScaler with core Load Balancing rules. The core protocols like TCP, HTTP and UDP are supported and you can use the load balancing algorithms like Round Robin, Source IP and Least connection. It also supports session persistency based on Source IP and Cookie.

There's a nice overview of how that works over on the Citrix blog.