This post is part of the Open Source Cloud Computing series. For an Overview, please click on the Tag.

Networking with CloudStack

Networking with CloudStack can be achieved with two topologies: the first topology is handled like with Amazon Web Services (AWS). This enables guest isolation via IP-Filtering. More networking possibilities are delivered with the “advanced” networking options. The advanced option allows multiple networks in a zone. Each individual network in an advanced setup needs to have a specific network type. They can be guest mode, management mode, public mode and storage mode.

Multi-tenancy

CloudStack provides multi-tenancy with the concept of Accounts, Domains and Users. An account is typically a tenant. Each Account may contain more users. A Domain allows the datacenter provider to group similar account types and to ease management of them. CloudStack may be extended by LDAP services such as Active Directory. Another concept is the “Project”. A project is a group of users working on similar tasks. Within a marketing department might be different project such as “product launch web site”. Several users might need to work on this project. Billing can be based either on the user’s consumption or on the project consumption, which allows even more detailed billing on a project basis. Project can also be limited in resource usage.
Header Image Copyright by Horia Varlan

CloudStack is currently available in the Version 4.0 and was usually initiated by Cloud.com, which was later acquired by Citrix. The source code for CloudStack is available open source and it is maintained as an Apache Project. The target of CloudStack is similar to the other 3 described projects: provide an Infrastructure as a Service Software. CloudStack supports both commercial hypervisors as well as open source hypervisors. From the commercial side, CloudStack currently implements Citrix XenServer and VMware vSphere and as for open source hypervisors there is support for XEN and KVM running on Ubuntu or CentOS. CloudStack is built to run tens of thousands of virtual Servers in geographically distributed regions. There is one managing server for all clusters, which makes cluster-wide management servers unnecessary. CloudStack configures each node automatically regarding storage and networking. Internally managed virtual appliances take care of firewalling, routing, DHCP, VPN access, console proxy, storage access, and storage replication. CloudStack also offers a graphical user interface (GUI) to ease configuration. The CloudStack API also supports Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 and S3. CloudStack provides an extensibility API, allowing solution providers to extend the capabilities of CloudStack. CloudStack consists of two major components: the Management Server and the Cloud Infrastructure. The Management Server controls the Cloud Infrastructure and there is typically one of that kind. The Cloud Infrastructure consists of various nodes running virtual Instances and the Management Server manages each of them. The Cloud Infrastructure consists of one or more dedicated Servers, but in a minimal installation it can also be run on the same machine as the Management Server.

CloudStack Overview