The battle of CloudStack against OpenStack is not very significant as it’s just a step towards advanced cloud management. To begin with, these platforms were devised as cloud computing has turned out to be an integral aspect for several companies. The big thrust came in for logical cloud-level management, which could offer several ways to control several workloads. Now, let’s look at the promising aspects of both of these options.
Open Stack
Handled by the OpenStack foundation, the real platform has many interlinked stack-oriented projects. All of these later links into a single management interface to give a platform, which is great for managing cloud computing tasks.
Users: The list of users for this platform has been growing consistently.
Launched as a joint venture by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, OpenStack had few serious supporters from the beginning. At present, it’s used by companies like AT&T, Yahoo!, Red Hat Open Shift, CERN, and HP Public Cloud.
What’s New: OpenStack still has few deployment and technical snags, but this has not affected the momentum of adoption. The recent Juno release hypes of 342 new features. It’s added with enterprise features like a new service for data processing that provisions Spark and Hadoop; besides it also has improved storage policies. It also puts the base for OpenStack to be a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) platform, which is the main changeover driving enhanced efficiency and agility in data centers of service providers.
Pros: It’s certainly a very advanced product, and there are over 150 organizations contributing to its development. Furthermore, it has evolved as the cloud platform management leader.
Challenges: There’s such a lot of development surrounding this platform, but still it’s challenging to deploy.
In several cases, it has to be managed from many CLI consoles.
CloudStack
Working on hypervisors such as XenServer, KVN, and at present Hyper-V, CloudStack refers to an open-source cloud management platform devised for creating, managing, and implementing many cloud services. With its developing API-backed stack, it already fully favors the Amazon AWS API model.
Users: CloudStack is presently the global cloud infrastructure for DataPipe, the largest present user. Besides this, there are few other smaller adopters like SunGard Availability Services, Shopzilla, WebMD Health, CloudOps, and Citrix.
What’s New: The version 4.1 comes with enhanced security, advanced network-layer management, and hypervisor agnosticism. 4.2 has just released. The main updates focus on enhanced storage management, enhanced VPC and Hyper-V Zones support apart from VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler support.
Pros: CloudStack’s certainly getting much better. The recent launch is in fact quite good. The implementation is absolutely smooth with just a single virtual machine running the CloudStack Management Server and the second acting as the real cloud infrastructure. In the real world, it’s possible to deploy the entire thing on a single physical host.
Challenges: The foremost stable CloudStack release was in 2013 with 4.0.2, but still some of them are doubtful about the rate of its adoption. Though there were some vast advancements, few complain that the installation and architecture process require good amount of time and knowledge to install.
In a nutshell, OpenStack is certainly a more extensively adopted and more mature platforms, though that does not imply it’s not facing challenges from the other market players. CloudStack is also equally giving a tough competition to OpenStack, and both of them have secured the top two spots in the segment.