Why CloudStack is not a Citrix project

I was at CloudExpo Europe in London last week for the Open Cloud Forum to give a tutorial on CloudStack tools. A decent crowd showed up, all carrying phones. Kind of problematic for a tutorial where I wanted the audience to install python packages and actually work :) Luckily I made it self-paced so you can follow at home. Giles from Shapeblue was there too and he was part of a panel on Open Cloud. He was told once again "But Apache CloudStack is a Citrix project !" This in itself is a paradox and as @jzb told me on twitter yesterday "Citrix donated CloudStack to Apache, the end". Apache projects do not have any company affiliation.

I don't blame folks, with all the vendors seemingly supporting OpenStack, it does seem that CloudStack is a one supporter project. The commit stats are also pretty clear with 39% of commits coming from Citrix. This number is also probably higher since those stats are reporting gmail and apache as domain contributing 20 and 15% respectively, let's say 60% is from Citrix. But nonetheless, this is ignoring and mis-understanding what Apache is and looking at the glass half empty.

When Citrix donated CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) it relinquished control of the software and the brand. This actually put Citrix in a bind, not being able to easily promote the CloudStack project. Indeed, CloudStack is now a trademark of the ASF and Citrix had to rename their own product CloudPlatform (powered by Apache CloudStack). Citrix cannot promote CloudStack directly, it needs to get approval to donate sponsoring and follow the ASF trademark guidelines. Every committer and especially PMC members of Apache CloudStack are now supposed to work and protect the CloudStack brand as part of the ASF and make sure that any confusion is cleared. This is what I am doing here.

Of course when the software was donated, an initial set of committers was defined, all from Citrix and mostly from the former cloud.com startup. Part of the incubating process at the ASF is to make sure that we can add committers from other organization and attract a community. "Community over Code" is the bread and butter of ASF and so this is what we have all been working on, expanding the community outside Citrix, welcoming anyone who thinks CloudStack is interesting enough to contribute a little bit of time and effort. Looking at the glass half empty is saying that CloudStack is a Citrix project "Hey look 60% of their commits is from Citrix", looking at it half full like I do is saying "Oh wow, in a year since graduation, they have diversified the committer based, 40% are not from Citrix". Is 40% enough ? of course not, I wish it were the other way around, I wish Citrix were only a minority in the development of CloudStack.

Couple other numbers: Out of the 26 members of the project management committee (PMC) only seven are from Citrix and looking at mailing lists participation since the beginning of the year, 20% of the folks on the users mailing list and 25% on the developer list are from Citrix. We have diversified the community a great deal but the "hand-over", that moment when new community members are actually writing more code than the folks who started it, has not happened yet. A community is not just about writing code, but I will give it to you that it is not good for a single company to "control" 60% of the development, this is not where we/I want to be.

This whole discussion is actually against Apache's modus operandi. Since one of the biggest tenant of the foundation is non-affiliation. When I participate on the list I am Sebastien, I am not a Citrix employee. Certainly this can put some folks in conflicting situations at times, but the bottom line is that we do not and should not take into account company affiliation when working and making decisions for the project. But if you really want some company name dropping, let's do an ASF faux-pas and let's look at a few features:

The Nicira/NSX and OpenDaylight SDN integration was done by Schuberg Phillis, the OpenContrail plugin was done by Juniper, Midokura created it's own plugin for Midonet and Stratosphere as well, giving us a great SDN coverage. The LXC integration was done by Gilt, Klarna is contributing in the ecosystem with the vagrant and packer plugins, CloudOps has been doing terrific job with Chef recipes, Palo-Alto networks integration and Netscaler support, a google summer of code intern did a brand new LDAP plugin and another GSoC did the GRE support for KVM. RedHat contributed the Gluster plugin and PCExtreme contributed the Ceph interface while Basho of course contributed the S3 plugin for secondary storage as well as major design decisions on the storage refactor. The Solidfire plugin was done by, well Solidfire and Netapp has developed a plugin as well for their virtual storage console. NTT contributed the CloudFoundry interface via BOSH. On the user side, Shapeblue is leading the user support company. So no it's not just Citrix.

Are all these companies members of the CloudStack project ? No. There is no such thing as a company being a member of an ASF project. There is no company affiliation, there is no lock in, just a bunch of guys trying to make good software and build a community. And yes, I work for Citrix and my job here will be done when Citrix only contributes 49% of the commits. Citrix is paying me to make sure they loose control of the software, that a healthy ecosystem develops and that CloudStack keeps on becoming a strong and vibrant Apache project. I hope one day folks will understand what CloudStack has become, an ASF project, like HTTP, Hadoop, Mesos, Ant, Maven, Lucene, Solr and 150 other projects. Come to Denver for #apachecon you will see ! The end.

How I look at Citrix...

I am closing in on my first year with Citrix working in the community team of Apache CloudStack, it's about time to describe how I look at Citrix and why I decided to leave a +10 year career in academia behind to work on Open Source...at Citrix. Disclaimer: if you don't want to read about Citrix products, stop right there.

Prior to joining Citrix I only knew it as the company that "brings windows to unix" delivering applications through an equivalent of remote desktop. It's a very unsavory and unfair summary at best and the XenDesktop folks will hate me for it :). What I quickly discovered is that Citrix has embraced the Cloud trying to deliver applications "anywhere, to anyone on any device", it is more than talk as I realized by going through the product list. This was especially intriguing to me because I did not understand why Citrix was getting into the Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer area by acquiring cloud.com. IaaS software is more the purview of data centers vendors and Citrix struck me as a "top of the stack" company.

To understand why I think Citrix is a true Cloud company you need to get back to the Cloud definition that most of us refer to these days. The NIST definition, it defines Cloud as "...a model for enabling ubiquitous on-demand network access to a shared pool of network resources...that can rapidly be provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction " it is the coming of age of utility computing where anyone can access any computing service at anytime from anywhere. Virtualization has been a key enabler of Cloud in the data center and the IaaS layer (or Fabric layer) has become the most mature of the Cloud layers. With Citrix acquiring Cloud.com and donating CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) it told me that Citrix was catching up and complementing its portfolio of products. What I did not expect is to realize that Citrix already had the other pieces of the Cloud puzzle building a suite of products that would enable on-demand/scalable network access to applications autonomically, in short: an app-focused cloud middleware.

At the fabric layer, resource sharing deals with computer, network and storage services. Server virtualization is a key component of IaaS and with XenServer Citrix has the leading hypervisor of the Cloud. To share compute resources, and manage farms of XenServer an orchestrator is needed. That's where CloudPlatform (commercial offering of Apache CloudStack) fits in. CloudPlatform orchestrates compute services and leverages existing storage and networking solutions. But here comes NetScaler, the networking piece, load-balancer, application firewall, branch repeater and cloud connector (via GRE tunnels, IPsec and so on). In storage, Sharefile is there. Unfortunately it is not an enterprise data center storage solution like today's large scale object store or traditional NAS solution but more of a DropBox equivalent (again not doing it justice) which includes corporate data governance.

At the Platform layer or PaaS, Citrix deals more with brokering and management of applications than a PaaS like Microsoft Azure or Google App Engine. CloudPortal is set to become a true Cloud broker offering a marketplace of applications, usage metering and billing making use of enterprise IaaS solutions to provision the applications in the datacenter. XenDesktop, XenApp and VDI-in-a-box are some of the solutions that CloudPlatform can broker. This will bring the traditional Citrix business to the Cloud (i.e Avalon project), providing on-demand, scalable, metered IT services.

At the SaaS layer, Citrix provides true collaboration services with it's GoTo* suite and Podio a social/collaborative platform. Surely these will soon be bundled in CloudPlatform for on-demand access. The nature of these apps speak to Citrix commitment to Clouds and a new way of working "anywhere, with anyone on any device" as they empower remote workers. And despite Yahoo's recent announcement about remote working I am very thankful for these apps and for Citrix walking the talk. To keep enabling mobility Citrix also offers additional middleware which I place in this SaaS layer even though they are not end-user application. XenMobileMDM and CloudGateway solve the problem of access management to application and data from the many devices that are now part of an enterprise IT.

Missing Pieces: This short mapping of Citrix products to the three basic layers of the Cloud highlights couple missing pieces. I am listing them here but I have no visibility and Citrix acquisition strategy so don't read anything else into it :). While Citrix has now a strong offering at the IaaS layer with XenServer, CloudPlatform (based on Apache CloudStack) and NetScaler. It does lack a true Cloud data center storage solution that would open the door to the Big Data market. Sharefile is more tailored for the individual end-user within the enterprise. Maybe packaging Apache Hadoop could fill this gap. In any case Citrix has strategic partnerships with NetApp and EMC as well as an innovative partner InkTank which is behind Ceph. At the PaaS layer, CloudPlatform is really a broker between app consumers and the cloud backends. A PaaS for application developers would be an interesting addition, even though these markets are still in the "trigger". A partnership with EMC on CloudFoundry and RedHat on OpenShift focused on integration with CloudStack/CloudPlatform would be interesting. I might also complement the middleware systems with a Data Analytics solution to mine one's data center and optimize application delivery, but that's my research hat thinking. The SaaS is a huge market and the goal is not to cover it all. I don't see any glaring gaps there, what strikes me the most at this layer is that the type of device we use will evolve quickly (e.g Google Glass), if one day people show up to work with "Glasses" what will Citrix Receiver be on Glass ?

Open Source: With this strong vision of Clouds, Citrix seemed perfect for me. What really made me accept the challenge of a new job was that Citrix open sourced CloudPlatform, donating it to the Apache Software Foundation. I had been an Open Source consumer (mostly) for a long time and it seemed right to get on the producer side. This was a true departure from its Microsoft ties, first by acquiring a data center software but second by reaching out to the Linux community. After the Xen Project this move spoke volume to me and was at the same time intriguing. Citrix has now stepped its Open Source efforts even more, putting the Xen Project under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation and being part of the OpenDayLight Software Defined Networking (SDN) consortium. There again IaaS is leading the way. I don't know yet what's in store for the other layers of the Cloud at Citrix, but if the recent Open Source activities are any signs, we can expect to see some Open Sourcing (in various forms: full software, API, community edition etc) at the other layers. This will further improve Citrix's reputation in the OSS community and help create an ecosystem around the terrific portfolio that we already have. Open Sourcing is key to innovation and we want Citrix to be a leading innovator of the Cloud.

In short, there is more to Clouds than virtual machine management and Citrix tackles the end-to-end cloud spectrum reaching out to the dream of computing as a utility in a mobile world.