Citrix submits cloud-building software to Apache Foundation

Citrix today said that software for building Amazon EC2-style cloud platforms will be submitted to the Apache Software Foundation in an effort to accelerate its development.

Known as CloudStack, the software was acquired by Citrix when it bought the vendor Cloud.com in July 2011 for a reported $200 million. CloudStack was initially a mix of proprietary software and open source code released under the GPL free software license. Citrix said CloudStack will now become a “full open source Apache project,” to be released today under the Apache 2.0 license, and also announced that it has increased its financial sponsorship and engineering support for the Apache Foundation.

Amazon popularized infrastructure-as-a-service clouds with the 2006 introduction of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and other vendors have been pitching alternatives, either in the form of competing services or software—such as CloudStack—that can be used to turn virtualized resources into EC2-style networks. Those networks are then offered publicly through service providers or privately by businesses to their own users. CloudStack is compatible with Amazon’s APIs, allowing for compatibility of workloads across CloudStack and Amazon.

Separately, Eucalyptus and OpenStack are also open source tools for building cloud networks, with the latter already having been released under the Apache license. Proprietary alternatives include VMware’s vCloud Director and Microsoft’s private cloud tools built on Windows Server and System Center.

One thing that makes the CloudStack submission to Apache significant is that OpenStack “is a highly immature platform” with bugs and missing features, according to Gartner analyst Lydia Leong. In a blog post, she wrote that CloudStack, by comparison, is “production-stable and relatively turnkey,” and comparable to VMware’s vCloud Director. The Apache submission of CloudStack, she also wrote, “includes not just the core components, which are already open-source, but also all of the currently closed-source commercial components (except any third-party things that were licensed from other technology companies under non-Apache-compatible licenses).”

OpenStack, built by Rackspace and NASA, has received numerous commitments from big names, including AT&T, Canonical, HP, Dell, AMD, Intel, and others. Citrix had been putting its weight behind OpenStack before going its own way with the Cloud.com acquisition. Clearly, with the Apache submission, Citrix is hoping to build a bigger coalition around CloudStack software. Already, CloudStack has “30,000 community members, thousands of certified apps, and hundreds of production clouds,” Citrix said.

Last October, we noted that Citrix was previewing its first Citrix-branded release of CloudStack, with support for Hyper-V, VMware’s vSphere and KVM, and a version optimized for Citrix’s own XenServer. (Hyper-V support has not yet been added as Citrix promised to do.) Today, Citrix said it will “deliver a commercially supported release of the proposed Apache CloudStack distribution,” but did not provide a timeline.