The Apache Foundation’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform CloudStack was just released in version 4.16. The update is an LTS release, which means blocker defects, vulnerabilities and exposures found to impact the release will be merged and released for the next 18 months (so until about April 2023).
Amongst the 22 new major features the release notes list — which also include support for OpenSuse and Rocky Linux — are a couple of UI enhancements which should make the project a bit more comfortable to use.
Operators now have the option to select multiple objects and run bulk actions on them or import/export VMware virtual machines, whose resource consumption should be a bit more granular to control as well. Version 4.16 also provides the ability to configure icons for several resource types and fit resources with notes via the new comments section.
The CloudStack team has been busy improving the platform’s Kubernetes service, so that it now offers capabilities to automatically scale clusters up if pods can’t be scheduled due to higher than usual utilisation. To make things a bit easier to manage and get rid of the CoreOS dependency in the former base template, Kubernetes clusters now use the System VM Template.
Users who have been missing Linstor Volumes and Dell EMC VxFlex from the list of CloudStack storage options can now set them as primary storage and manage them through a new set of plugins.
The initiative to make CloudStack easier to upgrade continued with the recent release, automating the VM Template registration process and improving database upgrades to work without root credentials. Other than that, CloudStack now comes fitted with new API endpoints for updating pod management network and VLAN IP ranges and a way of marking hosts as degraded.
A complete list of fixes and enhancements can be found in the CloudStack documentation.
Well-known CloudStack users include British Telecom, Disney, Nokia, and Dell. The project has been available as open source since around 2010, which also marks the year of the first release of CloudStack’s main competitor, OpenStack.