After graduation from Apache incubator in March this year, CloudStack has come up with its first major release. Apache CloudStack project recently announced CloudStack Version 4.1.0, which is a clear indicator that the cloud orchestration platform is in completely blooming state. If you remember, Citrix submitted the project to the Apache Foundation in 2012. It was released as an ASF approved CloudStack as a TLP (top-level project) this March. With this latest release, it has become an integrated software platform that enables users to build a feature-rich IaaS.

The 4.1.0 release includes several new features such as:

• An API discovery service that allows an end point to list its supported APIs and their details.
• Added an Events Framework to CloudStack to provide an “event bus” with publish, subscribe, and unsubscribe semantics. Includes a RabbitMQ plug-in that can interact with AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) servers.
• Implement L3 router functionality for the VMware Nicira network virtualization platform (NVP) plug-in.
• Support for Linux’s built-in Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization with NVP L3 router functionality.
• Support for AWS (Amazon Web Service) style regions

CloudStack Version 4.1.0 also includes major changes in the codebase, aimed at making the platform easier for developers, along with a new structure for creating RPM/Debian packages and the full adoption of Maven as a build tool.

“CloudStack is a mature, stable project, is also free as in beer and speech. We believe that if you’re going to be building an IaaS cloud for private or public consumption, you’ll be better served choosing an open platform that any organization can participate in and contribute to. CloudStack is a very mature offering that’s relatively easy to deploy and manage, and it’s known to power some very large clouds–e.g., Zynga with tens of thousands of nodes–and very distributed clouds–such as Datapipe, which has nodes on both coasts of North America, in China, and I believe London and one coming online soon in Iceland,” said CloudStack Project Management Committee (PMC) member Joe Brockmeier.

An interesting thing about CloudStack is that when Citrix submitted CloudStack, most of the contributors to the code base were the company’s own engineers. By end of March, 164 contributors had made 16,795 commits to the code base, representing 1,161,748 lines of code. Today, it has 17,933 commits made by 184 contributors, representing 1,668,112 lines of code, which sounds absolutely amazing.

The increasing number of contributors is the key for CloudStack is all set to take on rivals such as OpenStack, which has a long list of 1,000 contributors, and Eucalyptus, which is older than both these platforms.