In 2012, I used Rackspace. It then became OpenStack. I switched to CloudStack because OpenStack had too many plug-ins. It led to too many changes in dependencies, which made it very cumbersome to support.

We tried OpenStack, but provisioning the VMs was too complicated. It wasn't working for us, so we switched to CloudStack. We tried it out to see if we could provision the VMs, and we started building the integrations that our developers and development engineers need.

At my previous company I used OpenStack, which was around the year 2010. Both these solutions cover the same proposal for cloud computing in that they create virtual machines, segregate them, and provide storage as a service, and so on. The main difference lies in the complexity. For example, using OpenStack, you need a lot of technical staff specialized in OpenStack specifically in order to manage it. With CloudStack, on the other hand, you can simply use your on-site staff who are already working on the infrastructure.

We have used a different solution in the past.

We tend to use a lot of automation technology that is open-source. 

We used OnApp for cloud. It is deployed on premises, and paid, and still it did not give us flexibility. For example, we couldn’t export VMs, CLI capabilities were limited, only Xen hypervisors.

This product has been in use since I joined the company.

We were using VMware and Xen earlier, but to reduce the cost and to make management simple, everything has been moved to KVM and CloudStack. Both KVM and CloudStack are free.

We have been on CloudStack since the start.

It is my first solution to manage the on-premise environments.

We did not use a previous solution.

OpenStack was my first implementation but it’s really difficult to manage. The installation required a lot of resources just to start the platform, and the user experience was totally unsatisfactory.

After that I tried Azure Stack just for testing, but it’s also very heavy.

We've tested OpenStack, VMware vCloud Director and VMware Cloud Automation Center. We chose CloudStack because we saw it with a better TCO ratio, balancing innovation, and starting the DevOps culture with a low operational overhead.