The Story of LifeinCloud
LifeinCloud is a privately-owned, European public cloud provider on a mission to make powerful cloud solutions more accessible to developers and businesses worldwide.
They started in 2009 as a managed services provider, later expanding into private cloud solutions. As demand grew, they faced a similar challenge to many in our community:
"Each client environment was essentially a separate island. We were duplicating efforts across different environments - separate hardware, separate maintenance windows, separate upgrade cycles. This wasn't just inefficient; it was unsustainable as we looked to scale."
-Bogdan Rohan, LifeinCloud Founder & CEO
Their solution? Building a multi-region public cloud platform powered by Apache CloudStack. The results transformed their operations: 40% reduction in overhead, 85%+ infrastructure utilization, and onboarding time cut from weeks to hours.
But the interesting part is how they got there.
The choice: CloudStack vs OpenStack
During their technical evaluation, LifeinCloud's team discovered significant architectural differences between the two platforms. Their CTO, George Lisandru, explains why OpenStack's architecture proved challenging for what they were trying to achieve:
"OpenStack's architecture follows the Unix philosophy - many small components each doing one thing well. In theory, this provides maximum flexibility. In practice, it means you need separate services for compute (Nova), networking (Neutron), identity (Keystone), image management (Glance) and storage (Cinder). Each component needs its own high-availability setup, monitoring and maintenance. It's as powerful as it is complex."
Their testing revealed striking differences in resource requirements for managing 100 VMs:
- OpenStack needed 5+ control nodes and nearly 100GB of RAM just to manage itself
- CloudStack ran the same workload with a single management server (two for HA) and just 16GB of RAM
- Ceph integration with CloudStack "just worked," while OpenStack required additional components and careful configuration
George also singled out CloudStack's API-first approach as a major advantage:
"It's remarkably stable and well-documented. The API hasn't broken compatibility in years, making it reliable for long-term automation. This is crucial for our customers building infrastructure-as-code pipelines."
Implementation Challenges
While basic deployment was straightforward, the team encountered several technical hurdles, as George notes:
"The documentation for advanced HA configurations could be better. We ended up working directly with ShapeBlue and the CloudStack community to resolve some edge cases."
Other challenges included:
- Extensive Ceph optimization for their workload patterns
- Network configuration refinement for maximum throughput
- Management server database tuning for multi-datacenter operations
Real-World Performance
After optimization, LifeinCloud reports that their deployment is now delivering consistent performance:
Compute Layer:
- VM Provisioning: 45 seconds average (down from 3+ minutes)
- Live Migration: Sub-second downtime for running VMs
- CPU Overhead: Less than 2% for KVM virtualization
Storage Layer (Ceph with NVMe):
- Random 4K Read: 120,000 IOPS per storage node
- Sequential Read: 3.2 GB/s sustained throughput
- Latency: Sub-5ms for cached reads
Storage Architecture
When asked about why Ceph won, LifeinCloud’s CTO explains: "Ceph, while more resource-intensive, met our reliability requirements and offered better scaling characteristics."
Their current Ceph implementation provides:
- Triple replication for data redundancy
- Dedicated networks for replication traffic
- Optimized placement groups for better performance
- Integration with NVMe SSD storage for high-performance workloads
Network Architecture
Their network design emphasizes redundancy and isolation through:
- Dual physical switches for hardware redundancy
- Network bonding on all hosts
- Automatic failover capabilities
- VLAN-based network separation
- Granular firewall controls
- Support for custom network topologies
Security Architecture
The provider says security was built as a fundamental component into every layer of their stack:
Network Security:
- CloudStack's VLAN capabilities maintain complete customer traffic separation
- Per-VLAN firewall rules allow customers to implement precise security controls
- No cross-tenant network visibility
- Granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) system
- Precise permission management
- Comprehensive admin action logging for compliance requirements
"The centralized management approach is key here," notes George. "When something needs investigation, we're not playing detective across five different dashboards trying to piece together what happened."
Technical Roadmap
The LifeinCloud platform currently operates across multiple datacenters:
- Frankfurt: Chosen for proximity to DE-CIX, Europe's largest Internet peering exchange
- Bucharest: Features some of the fastest broadband internet globally
- London: Europe’s largest data center market and a global business hub
- Miami: Planned for end of 2025, connecting European customers to the Americas
Having just released their Kubernetes, high-frequency compute, and S3-compatible object storage offerings, their upcoming technical initiatives include GPU support with direct device passthrough.
The Final Verdict
After running CloudStack in production, LifeinCloud achieved the scalability they needed without the complexity they feared. Their infrastructure handled growth from one region to multiple availability zones while maintaining performance and reliability. Their CTO adds: "So far, we're happy with how ACS performed in this expansion: one platform, multiple regions, no silos. We can scale globally while keeping data exactly where it needs to be."