Citrix today unveiled the next phase of its strategy to accelerate the broad adoption of open, interoperable cloud computing. As a key part of this strategy, the company’s popular CloudStack™ solution will become the first cloud platform in the industry to be submitted to the Apache Software Foundation, home of the world’s most successful open source projects. Elevating CloudStack into a full open source Apache project will further accelerate its mission of delivering a powerful, proven, hypervisor-agnostic platform that helps customers of all sizes build true Amazon-style clouds. CloudStack brings to Apache more than 30,000 community members, thousands of certified apps, and hundreds of production clouds, collectively generating more than $1 billion in cloud revenue from some of the biggest brands in the industry. To capitalize on this market momentum, Citrix will also deliver a commercially supported release of the proposed Apache CloudStack distribution as the centerpiece of its cloud infrastructure product portfolio.
The transition to the Cloud Era is fueling a massive build out of cloud infrastructure, projected to exceed $11 billion by the end of 20141. This new market will feature thousands of successful clouds of all shapes and sizes, ranging from business, infrastructure and developer offerings, to consumer, mobile and gaming services. The proposed Apache CloudStack project will make it easier for customers of all types to deliver cloud services on a platform that is open, powerful, flexible and “Proven Amazon Compatible.”
Open Source in the Cloud Era
Unlike previous generations of computing, the Cloud Era is being fueled in large part by open source technology that was first proven at scale in large production clouds, then made available to customers of all sizes under open source licenses. The Apache Software Foundation is leading the way with highly successful projects like Hadoop, Hive and Cassandra that were initially developed in large, successful clouds like Facebook and Yahoo!, then released for broader use under the Apache License. This proven method for incubating and advancing leading open source cloud projects is ideal for bringing a vibrant community of vendors and developers together to accelerate innovation, interoperability and standardization. As the first step in this strategy, Citrix CloudStack 3 will be released today under Apache License 2.0, and the CloudStack.org community will become part of the highly successful Apache Incubator program. Citrix will further support the project with a significantly increased investment in engineering, community support and marketing. (See separate Citrix announcement today: CloudStack Citrix to Become a Platinum Sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation)
More to Come At Citrix Synergy 2012
Citrix CEO Mark Templeton and GM of Cloud Platforms, Sameer Dholakia, will discuss today’s announcement and unveil further details about the company’s broader cloud strategy at the upcoming Citrix Synergy 2012 conference May 9-11 in San Francisco. Citrix will also sponsor two CloudStack Design Summits within the year, bringing together a broad range of partners, developers and users to engage, learn and collaborate on the newly launched project.
Broad Ecosystem Support
In addition to more than 100 successful production deployments, CloudStack has been verified to work with more than 2,200 products and services across the industry as part of the Citrix Ready Cloud Community Program – building on a rich tradition of interoperability that is immediately inherited by the proposed Apache CloudStack project. In addition, Citrix was joined in today’s announcement by more than 50 independent software vendors, providers and technology partners demonstrating their support of the CloudStack project including ActiveState, Alcatel-Lucent, Alurium, Apalia, Appcara, AppFog, Big Switch Networks, Brocade, BT, Caringo, Clogeny, Cloud Central, CloudSoft, Contegix, CumuLogic, Datapipe, Engine Yard, enStratus, Equinix, Extreme Networks, GigaSpaces, GoDaddy, Gluster, GreenQloud, Hortonworks, HostBill, Intel, jclouds, Juniper Networks, IDC Frontier, Kaavo, KT, LeaseWeb, LogicWorks, Midokura, NetApp, Nexenta, Ninefold, OpsCode, Puppet Labs, Racemi, RightScale, rPath, Scale Computing, ScaleXtreme, Scalr, ServiceMesh, Softlayer, Sungard, SwiftStack, Tata Communications, TCloud Computing, TrendMicro, UShareSoft, VMTurbo, Vyatta, Zenoss and Zuora.