Len Bellemore and Tulio de Souza's talk from the CloudStack EU User Group meetup, Nov 24 2016

1. Making Stuff Better ThroughMaking Stuff Better Through
CloudstackCloudstack
Deploying cloud-based phone systems

2. • IT Service Provider
• Mobile, WAN, Telephony, Datacentres, Managed Services
• One of the UK’s largest Mitel Phone System resellers

3. • Lead Data Analytics Team
– Software Development
– Monitoring & Data
– IT Architecture
• Built our ACS platform in 2013
• Areas of Interest
– Making things better through technology
– Building great teams

4. • Member of the Data Analytics Team (joined in January)
• Proud father of two
• Ph.D. in Computer Science
• Areas of interest
– Software Engineering
– Security/Data Privacy
– Automation/Integration
– Scalability
– System Architecture
• New to cloudstack

5. • Mitel licensing changes allowed for consumption-based
usage
• Using a 3rd
party to host cloud-based Mitel systems
• Decided to host in-house
• Needed to be VMWare
• Existing Cloudstack platform was chosen
– more because we had high hopes for the possibilities rather than us
actually knowing how we would do things 

6. • Apache Cloudstack
• (with support from Shape Blue)
• VMWare ESXi (Xen too)
• Brocade Switches
• Netapp Storage
• Mitel virtual appliances
– Custom Linux builds
– Some Windows
• Our own MPLS network plus direct carrier integration

7. • VPC per customer
• Or across two Zones for a resilient option
• Up to 25 virtual machines across two Zones
• SIP and WAN networks delivered to each VPC
• 180+ firewall rules

8. • Hosted on traditional VMWare
• Required lots of resource
– Network x2
– Virtualisation
– Mitel
– PM
• Too many handoffs between teams
• Manual builds
• Too much TIME!

9. • API driven deployments
• Simple UI for Mitel Engineers to do the (almost) full deploy
• Cut down on handoffs
• Build in repeatability
• Simplify the options

10. • Hosted on Cloudstack
• Requires LESS resource
– Network x 1
– Mitel
• Automated infrastructure builds (mostly)

11. • Automation of core network
• Configuration of Mitel appliances
• Replication
• Modifications
• Upgrades

12. • Fast
• Consistent
• Cost-effective (less people, faster)
• Autonomy for the Mitel team
• Driving Innovation
– Automation
– Challenging existing thought processes
• Breaking down tech silos

16. • Written in PHP
• Running against cloudstack 4.5
• Based on: https://github.com/qpleple/cloudstack-php-client
code stats
integration tests
unit tests

17. • API-driven model is awesome
• API documentation covers all API services and their fields
• Asynchronous calls
• Resilient API service

18. • Use of identifier everywhere but for account
• API-driven but it is getting messy
– Create a VM: 33 fields
– List VMs: 62 fields (top level only)
• Documentation:
– No definition of each type of field
– individual APIs do not state whether they are async or not
– Basic description per field (typos)

20. • We would still use
cloudstack but …

21. • Handles thecreationofmost cloudstackcomponents
• Handles thedependencies among resources
• Allows modifications of deployments

23. • Run as a daemon/service (cli application instead)
• Manage:
– domains
– accounts
– users
• Report progress during a run (feed UI)

24. • Any Questions?