Here's what I can say: The company I work for is a regional ISP based in southern California. We have two colocation facilities that we own and operate that account for a little over 10,000 sq. ft. and wanted to start offering IaaS services. We looked at a number of different CMPs including Eucalyptus, Enomaly/SpotCloud, Joyent, and OpenStack. At the time OS was in its infancy and we lacked sufficient development resources to really make good use of it. And while it's come a long way since then, its modular architecture (while powerful) means it takes more human resources to tilt up a cloud (and to a certain extent, maintain it).
CloudStack, compared to the other platforms we evaluated, provided us with the most flexible and desirable network configurations with the least amount of effort. This is an important point because OpenStack can absolutely duplicate the network configurations available through CloudStack but it took quite a bit more work. CloudStack was also more of an "out of box experience" in the sense that it's all packaged together. So while it is agnostic to hardware, hypervisors, and the like, it was centralized in management and the installation was pretty straight forward. At the time the other platforms were either more difficult to work with, or required a professional install where you handed the keys over to the vendor and they gave you back a running cloud with little or no explanation on how to do it other than some server pixie dust. CloudStack though, like any CMP, has a learning curve and you will probably bang up against a wall. We found the CloudStack community to be very welcoming and helpful (unlike some open source projects which just bark at you to "google" and berate you for not knowing something). For all of these reasons we decided that CloudStack. It was the most mature, easy to use, had the friendliest and best looking GUI (important for our customers), and a very powerful API. Also there was the promise of some EC2 compatibility which made migration of customers over to our cloud that much easier since they wouldn't have to re-tool. -----Original Message----- From: Animesh Chaturvedi [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 11:11 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [DISCUSS] "Arming" cloudstack supporters in "stack war" bakeoffs.... > -----Original Message----- > From: Alex Huang [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 10:54 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [DISCUSS] "Arming" cloudstack supporters in "stack war" bakeoffs.... > > Hi All, > > I like to discuss with the community how we can best "arm" cloudstack > supporters in "stack war" bakeoffs. This is due to Ilya's email thread. I > think > his question and others like it will be repeated often. The community > suggested an objective process to evaluate the various stacks: bakeoffs, > which I'm supportive of. But it make sense that people don't just enter into > these bake-offs blind. We should provide them with the information, > experience and process to properly conduct cloudstack in these bakeoffs. > However, I'm not sure what's the right combination to provide. So I like to > start this topic to see what the community thinks. > > I asked this during cloudstack-meeting and Chip suggested Dave's runbook. > That's a good starting point. Is there any other suggestions? > > There's a top level section in our wiki that makes sense for this. After we > come up with the right combination, we can update the wiki and continue to > update the wiki with more information. > > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CLOUDSTACK/Newbie > > Thanks. > > --Alex Folks wearing project management hats can you share any success stories and real customer experience and reasoning in choosing cloudstack publically?
