An overview of the design philosophy, vendor mix, and integration requirements for delivery of a production grade public or private cloud zone in Apache CloudStack.

1. Solving the Cloud Puzzle
The Complete Stack Explored
Ed Laczynski
VP – Cloud Strategy
Datapipe
@edla
edl@datapipe.com

2. DISCLAIMER
• No endorsements
of products by
Datapipe implied.
• Any opinions are
my own.
• YMMV. Use this
information at your
own risk.
• Thanks to reddit for
the pics
• Enjoy!

3. CloudStack: The Key Ingredient.
• Strong open source community
• Works at scale in production today, yet
easy to get started
• Wide ISV and ecosystem support
• Compatible will all major computing,
network, storage, and hypervisor
options, including AWS
• Lots of room for DIFFERENTIATION

4. But you need more
To deploy at scale You need:
A whole bunch of
technology assets and
To deploy production software.
workloads – public or
private Great people and expertise.
Willingness to experiment,
learn, and grow

5. The Stratosphere CloudStack Cloud

6. Datacenter, Network, Security, and Computing
THE HARDWARE STACK

7. You Need a Datacenter*
Three ways to get one:
1. Have one already
2. Build one (expensive)
3. Rent space in one (cheaper)
* This is where many folks stop
and use someone else’s cloud.

8. CloudStack requires a reliable and
flexible network design.
• 10GbE
• Redundant links to each component
• Separate management interface for network KVM
• Look for broad standards support, ability to
deploy in small, reliable chunks, loads of
bandwidth. You’ll need that for your IP based
storage.
• Doesn’t need to be too fancy. But needs to be
PLANNED.
• CloudStack will handle handle much of your
tenant networking. “Pseudo-SDN. “

9. Security
• Programmable routing and firewall rules are
really important. You’ll want flexibility.
• Ability to design network separation between
management, guest, and utility networks.
• Juniper SRX works well with CloudStack. Well
known, lots of support, lots of different models
available.
• Nail down your CloudStack network model early.
Rebuilding Zones and VLANs, IP bindings not fun.

10. Computing
• Buy servers.
• Lots of RAM.
• Reliability does matter. Be careful with off-
brands.
• We like simple 1U or 2U pizza boxes that can
be ripped and replaced. YMMV.

11. Storage (aka My Precious)
• We use a variety of vendors and storage
designs to surface reliable PRIMARY and
SECONDARY storage.
• We chose to standardize on NFS for both
storage models, across hypervisors. Keep it
simple.
• Use different storage for management
(Murphy’s Law)
• IP based. Use those 10GbE pipes.
• CloudStack doesn’t include Object Storage.

12. Everything else.
THE SOFTWARE STACK

13. Dashboard & Portal
• What your customers see. The surface of
your cloud.
• Build your own? Need talented software
devs. You can respond to customers
quickly.
• OR Use commercial product
• OR keep it simple with basic CloudStack
UI and server automation scripting.
Depends on your use case.

14. Logging
• CloudStack has limited logging capability; not
very useful for operational management.
• Need to alert on specific warnings, analyze
and pinpoint issues, etc.
• Splunk is your friend.
• Aggregate usage data as well - report on
templates, Service Offerings, etc

15. Inside out Splunk view of a global CloudStack cloud

17. Monitoring
• Cloud Ops requires extensive monitoring at all
levels, from physical infrastructure and system
resources, through the hypervisors, to the guest
resources.
• Built in monitoring is limited to non-existent.
• We use a mix of Zenoss and some proprietary IP.
• Why Zenoss? It’s CloudStack compatible,
agentless, and has a decent API to build on.
• We surface this as “Advanced Monitoring” via our
portals and API endpoints. Think about how you
offer monitoring.

19. Metering
• CloudStack has limited metering for certain
network models
• Third-party products can be plugged in:
– InMon Traffic Sentinel
• You still need to build your own metering for
any differentiated offerings.
• Metering needs to tie into your billing and
commercial model

20. Reporting and Billing
• Users and business execs want
reports.
• Users need to pay or allocate
funds for chargeback.
• CloudStack has very limited reporting and billing
capabilities.
• With combination of direct database access, a
logging tool, and some API calls, very elegant
reporting and billing interfaces can be built.
• We aggregate data in a NoSQL DB cluster (REDIS)
for quick and instant reporting and reconciliations.

21. You can innovate with reporting.

23. • Great API. But …. The default URL
endpoint is ugly, insecure, inflexible, and not
highly
available.http://somecloudstackmanagemen
tserver:8080/client/api
• HAProxy and nginx load balancers/reverse
proxy architecure. SSL
encryption.https://cloud.datapipe.com/api/c
ompute/v1
–Pretty. Secure. Flexible. Reliable.

24. Even more stuff
• Documentation
• Hypervisor Management
• Support and Ticketing
• Server Automation
• Template Management
• Capacity Management
• Sales force automation/CRM integration
• Marketing automation integration
• Guest Security, VPN, and Load Balancing
• Application Stacks
• …..and the list goes on.

25. Questions?
@edla
edl@datapipe.com