When people ask us why we use CloudStack over other options, it's not just one single feature that stands out. Over the years, we have valued CloudStack for its ease of use.

Many other open-source projects are backed by commercial companies, which can change their commercial alignments or goals quickly. Even though they offer open-source software, you may still have to align with their commercial targets. And this is where CloudStack becomes a totally different solution. Basically, it provides a more reliable and stable piece of infrastructure code. This has been our experience over the last 12 years of using CloudStack.

The initial implementation process was quite good.

My company could implement a lot of customizations and integration with load balancers and DNS. When we started using CloudStack, we didn't have that integration, so we developed that. We could fix anything missing in the solution. 

When compared to OpenStack, CloudStack is also an open-source platform that is continuously improving its features and capabilities with each new version release. Having worked with CloudStack 4.7, 4.14, and most recently, 4.17, I have noticed significant enhancements in the platform's features and customer experience, such as the introduction of a new user interface in the latest release. Notably, the latest versions have made major improvements to VM live migrations, making them more efficient and effective.

I have been impressed by CloudStack's most recent updates around Kubernetes. In particular, they have worked with Kubernetes to support the Cluster API, and you can now easily integrate Kubernetes into CloudStack and get access to a lot of good features. For example, CloudStack can support different hypervisors in the same infrastructure at the same time, such as when using KVM and VMware engine server simultaneously through your workload in the cloud.

We are currently working around the critical points in CloudStack in order to simplify the process, and before the newest versions, CloudStack needed to reload each Virtual Router for each tenant on top of CloudStack. Now, however, they have improved this process by ensuring zero downtime when building the Virtual Router. For a critical environment, this is a nice feature because you don't have to experience any downtime as before.

We were pretty happy with the affinity group feature, which worked well. Another feature I liked was the ability to use your own database to source from non-Amazon web services.

I liked the separation of the isolated network versus the shared network. Although it took a while to grasp, it turned out to be a good way to manage our infrastructure. Tagging also helped with managing resources.

In general, the VM’s life cycle was thought out really well. It captured different states and allowed us to manage the virtual machines through an API easily.

We like the virtualization capabilities. It is very effective. 

It's helpful to have it available on the cloud and useful for managed customers.

It is open-source.  

The product supports Kubernetes technologies. 

It supports multiple types of storage. It's a nice environment. It's easy to manage.

We can manage resources like CPU, RAM, and storage. We can limit users and manage them a little bit. 

It is stable.

The product is scalable and easy to manage. 

Being able to completely virtualize a customer’s physical data center and migrate any workload into the cloud, and cover the most complex use cases - while offering high performance and true volume QoS, backed by SSD-based managed storage - is what differentiates it from other IaaS solutions.

CloudStack’s private gateway networking feature is what enables us to offer utmost security and confidentially to our customers and partners, by enabling them to connect to their virtual data centers via dedicated, encrypted, private fiber lines that never touch the public internet space. Ease of setup and management are certainly important additional benefits for us on the engineering team.

Killer features for me were: 

• Support for many hypervisors
• ability to match business logic
• "everything in one box"
• available APIs.

The three features that I find most valuable are:

• It is user-friendly.
• It is scalable.
• The ease of API use. When you compare it with OpenStack, CloudStack is something that you can deploy faster on because you have fewer components and more services. You can use a single API to get things done, rather than multiple APIs on multiple modules.

Multiple types of hypervisor support, multi-zone support, and VPC are great valuable features, in my opinion. Also, there are shared network features - LB, VPN, etc. - which are very useful for every user.

• CloudStack supports every operating system that supports hypervisors, which makes the product more attractive, compared to vCloud Director or Azure.
• It is very easy to install and manage.
• It has the all modules in one node, unlike other software (OpenStack).
• The product allows a customized look and feel, and the ability to add custom workflows.

The most valuable feature from my point of view is access to environment via console through separate browser window.

We use CloudStack because it is simpler than OpenStack and has most features required to be an IaaS orchestration tool.

• CloudStack, by default, gives us a zone-based setup which makes it easier to manage datacenters located in different geographical areas.
• It gives us the ability to manage and segregate a guest network with openvSwitch and VLAN IDs.
• While OpenStack has different components and related DB and conf files, which is difficult to manage, CloudStack has just one database and few related conf files located in a single directory.
• Most logs are generated at a single location, which makes troubleshooting easier.

• CloudStack is simple to stand up and get off the ground in a hurry.
• Its centralized design allows for easier troubleshooting when compared to OpenStack.
• Out of the box, it’s very well suited for white labeling and IaaS.
• The back-end database design is simple and straight forward.
• The user interface is designed with external users in mind.
• Billing is relatively straightforward with this product.
• Not being restricted to just one hypervisor was nice.

Easy installation and simple IAAS cloud management.

The most valuable features are:

• Compatibility with various hypervisors such as Xen, KVM, vSphere, and Hyper-V.
• Support for multiple availability zones.
• Structured REST API and integration with virtual appliance vendors solutions.

The product gives us the ability to orchestrate large virtual environments and is flexible enough to allow us to configure it for what we need. We value the flexibility of the networking feature set as well as the ability to build virtual private clouds.

• CloudStack is very stable and scalable. 
• It uses a single code/project differently from other platforms, like OpenStack.
• It is very simple to implement and maintain.

The integration and MVC architecture build are awesome. The structuring of the components and isolated environments helped us when using parts of the framework at different levels of product development.

You can build your own cloud and make it customizable with APIs.

• User-friendly portal
• VPN P2S and S2S possibilities
• Easy to manage accounts and limits

It is easy to set up, unlike OpenStack (in 2013). It provides good KVM virtualization support.

The advanced network allows for creating a private network for better isolation of VMs.

The feature of the Apache CloudStack, IaaS.

• Stability
• Centralized management design that scales well
• Transparent interoperability with different hypervisors and manufacturers

We also have OpenStack in production, but many of our staff members prefer CloudStack for the reasons mentioned above (less complexity, less failure-prone). There are reasons we use both though – different workloads on different systems.

API support, LB-integration with NetScaler for auto-scaling support, and the flexibility to configure/represent the physical network (VPC, guest and network offerings). NFV light making it possible to have LB, FW, PortFoward and private networks is also very useful.