Thanks to everyone who chimed in, those are all great answers and valuable info.
Giles, my comment about flexibility stems mostly from having no practical experience with CloudStack while I have worked with a few incarnations of OpenStack that differed quite a lot in features. Also, Hongtu Zang in a previous thread made the following comment: > CloudStack is considered to be more lightweight and easier to deploy and > manage, while OpenStack is more flexible and customizable. It seemed reasonable that the two aspects could be at odd and a trade-off would have to be made. Glad to read about multi-tennancy and that architecture flexibility is retained. Best, Axel ------- Original Message ------- On Friday, April 21st, 2023 at 4:29 PM, Giles Sirett wrote: > Hi Axel, I'll try to give my view on your questions > > Kind Regards > Giles > > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Axel Baudot [email protected] > > Sent: Friday, April 21, 2023 1:14 AM > To: users [email protected] > > Subject: Arguing for Cloudstack for a HPC oriented datacenter > > Hello dear CloudStack users, > > As a team sitting at a crossroad to chose a solution to provision ressources for a HPC oriented datacenter: can a strong case be made for the use of Cloudstack over Openstack, OpenNebula or Kubernetes? > > In particular I have the following concerns : > > 1. The company provides infrastructure to clients, as well as full blown project development, so it trying to set up both a public cloud with resource billing and an internal development platform. This is the use case covered by CloudStack, right? Or could the flexibility of OpenStack be needed? > > > > This is well within Cloudstacks scope. As Cloudstack is multi-tennant from the ground-up, the internal dev platform would likely be just another tennant. It may be implemented as different zones, different domains or a whole range of different approaches but they are simply architectural choices > > > > I'd be interested to ask what extra flexibility you'd think you'd get with open stack for this use case ? > > > 2. It is also heavily geared toward HPC. I have seen little mention of HPC with CloudStack, while it is heavily advertised in OpenStack world, due to the ties with CERN and such. Can you think of limitations of CloudStack for this use case? I am also interested in case studies or any reading material on this combination. > > > > From a storage and compute perspective, that is really a conversation about the hardware and the hypervisor, not about what you use to orchestrate it. Networking is really the thing to consider with HPC and orchestration. Cloudstacks VR can scale but does need to be considered. > > > > 3. The team could standardize on containers soon (especially for dev environments). I would tend to do a simple VM + Docker workflow. Is it standard? > > > > Hmmm - very hard to answer that without knowing more. Most orgs these days would use K8S to orchestrate at the container level, with Cloudstack underneath (using CloudStacks CAPI provider or CKS) > > > 4. I am all for simplicity of operation and maintenance. I think CloudStack could really shine here, right? I also think that Kubernetes should be avoided because of this. Thing is, Kubeflow is getting some attention and we might have to support it... Is CKS considered mature for production and a viable solution in this case? > > > > Absolutely. Lots of orgs using CKS in production, but bear in mind that CKS is just deploying K8S clusters - so it doesn't avoid Kubernetes - it just makes deploying K8S simple > > > Thanks for reading, any food for thoughts will be very much appreciated. > > > > More generally, if you want to compare Openstack, Cloudstack and opennebula - you should really do a side-by-side evaluation > > > The reason people choose CloudStack over openstack is usually ease/cost/hassle - nearly everybody has to deploy a commercial distribution (or have a massive team). Cloudstack is "pure" opensource - everybody running CloudStack is running >>the opensource code and you can usually deploy Cloudstack in production in the same time as it takes to POC openstack . Opennebula isn’t as complicated but I don’t know if anybody is running it without the commercial version > > > > > > > Best, > Axel
