Adding new Dell EMC ECS Object Storage Plugin for CloudStack

[mhkadhum]

Description

This PR adds support for a Dell EMC ECS S3 object storage plugin for Apache CloudStack. ECS is a software-defined object storage platform that supports both object and file-system protocols, with a focus on scalable and reliable object storage. We have been using ECS in production for three years, and this work extends CloudStack’s existing MinIO plugin to provide similar functionality for ECS.

The implementation supports the full lifecycle of S3-compatible buckets on ECS, including user provisioning, bucket creation, policy management, versioning, creation-time encryption, and integration with CloudStack’s S3 Browser. All functionality has been tested in a lab environment on Ubuntu using a CloudStack development setup based on the official installation guidelines.

Key architectural differences from MinIO:

Management API Integration
ECS requires use of the ECS Management API (port 4443, or 443 when fronted by HAProxy). CloudStack authenticates with management-user credentials to perform bucket and user operations.

Namespace Requirements
A dedicated ECS namespace is required for CloudStack-managed buckets. Multiple namespaces allow different CloudStack environments to share the same ECS cluster.

S3 Endpoints (Public and Private)
ECS exposes S3 services on ports 9020/9021 (non-TLS/TLS). In our deployment, these are routed through HAProxy and exposed externally on port 443. The Public URL is displayed to CloudStack users, while the Private URL is used internally.

TLS Handling
The “Allow Insecure HTTPS” option controls whether CloudStack accepts untrusted certificates when communicating with the ECS Management API.

User Provisioning Workflow
When a CloudStack user creates their first bucket, CloudStack provisions a corresponding ECS object user using the CloudStack UUID with a cs- prefix. ECS generates access and secret keys once, which CloudStack securely stores and reuses for subsequent bucket operations.

Bucket features:

• Encryption: Supported only during bucket creation; CloudStack hides encryption in the update view.
• Bucket Policy: Supports Private and Public configurations.
• Versioning: Fully supported through the S3 API rather than the Management API.
• Object Lock: Not supported in this release; the UI hides the option and API calls return a clear error.

Bucket modification supports quota changes, versioning updates, and policy changes. Encryption is excluded because ECS does not allow changing it after creation.

CloudStack’s S3 Browser supports upload, download, delete, listing, and prefix filtering through the ECS S3 endpoint. ECS prevents deletion of non-empty buckets, and CloudStack surfaces these errors accordingly.

We welcome review and feedback. The development fork is available here:
https://github.com/mhkadhum/cloudstack

Types of changes

• Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to change)
• New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)
• Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
• Enhancement (improves an existing feature and functionality)
• Cleanup (Code refactoring and cleanup, that may add test cases)
• Build/CI
• Test (unit or integration test code)

Feature/Enhancement Scale or Bug Severity

Feature/Enhancement Scale

• Major
• Minor

Bug Severity

• BLOCKER
• Critical
• Major
• Minor
• Trivial

Screenshots (if appropriate):

How Has This Been Tested?

The plugin was tested in an Ubuntu-based CloudStack development environment created by cloning the CloudStack source and following the official installation instructions. Testing included:

• Management API authentication and namespace operations
• Object-user provisioning and credential handling
• Bucket creation, deletion, versioning, quota updates, and policy changes
• S3 Browser operations (upload, download, delete, listing, prefix navigation)
• Error handling for invalid configurations and unsupported Object Lock requests
• TLS and insecure-TLS scenarios
• HAProxy-fronted deployments for both Management API and S3 endpoints

[boring-cyborg]

Congratulations on your first Pull Request and welcome to the Apache CloudStack community! If you have any issues or are unsure about any anything please check our Contribution Guide (https://github.com/apache/cloudstack/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md)
Here are some useful points:

• In case of a new feature add useful documentation (raise doc PR at https://github.com/apache/cloudstack-documentation)
• Be patient and persistent. It might take some time to get a review or get the final approval from the committers.
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  In case of doubts contact the developers at:
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[jbampton]

You have failing tests for pre-commit and license checks.

Have a quick read up on pre-commit it really is a series of basic checks we run:

https://github.com/apache/cloudstack/blob/main/PRE-COMMIT.md

Also we normally add the ASF license header to all files or add an exclude

[codecov]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 3.59%. Comparing base (34b8870) to head (6f3efbe).
⚠️ Report is 47 commits behind head on main.

❗ There is a different number of reports uploaded between BASE (34b8870) and HEAD (6f3efbe). Click for more details.

HEAD has 1 upload less than BASE

Flag	BASE (34b8870)	HEAD (6f3efbe)
unittests	1	0

Additional details and impacted files

@@              Coverage Diff              @@
##               main   #12124       +/-   ##
=============================================
- Coverage     17.60%    3.59%   -14.02%     
=============================================
  Files          5915      446     -5469     
  Lines        529963    37788   -492175     
  Branches      64734     6977    -57757     
=============================================
- Hits          93300     1357    -91943     
+ Misses       426194    36265   -389929     
+ Partials      10469      166    -10303     

Flag	Coverage Δ
uitests	3.59% <ø> (+0.01%)	⬆️
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[sureshanaparti]

@mhkadhum can you check the build errors?

[mhkadhum]

Thanks for the feedback!

ive added the missing license headers and ran pre-commit locally, and pushed an updated commit

[DaanHoogland]

looks generally good @mhkadhum , thanks for the contribution. Will you be maintaining this? As it is a 3rd party component and it may require hardware or licenses not available to the project.

[mhkadhum]

looks generally good @mhkadhum , thanks for the contribution. Will you be maintaining this? As it is a 3rd party component and it may require hardware or licenses not available to the project.

Yes, I will be the maintainer for the plugin. I have made a new commit to fix the previous build. Could you kindly review it

[DaanHoogland]

I have not found any oddities in the code, but one remark (in two parts ;) ) Feel free to ignore but I think it will help in the future.

[DaanHoogland]

@blueorangutan package

[blueorangutan]

@DaanHoogland a [SL] Jenkins job has been kicked to build packages. It will be bundled with no SystemVM templates. I'll keep you posted as I make progress.

[blueorangutan]

Packaging result [SF]: ✔️ el8 ✔️ el9 ✔️ el10 ✔️ debian ✔️ suse15. SL-JID 16248

[DaanHoogland]

@blueorangutan test

[blueorangutan]

@DaanHoogland a [SL] Trillian-Jenkins test job (ol8 mgmt + kvm-ol8) has been kicked to run smoke tests

[blueorangutan]

[SF] Trillian test result (tid-15110)
Environment: kvm-ol8 (x2), zone: Advanced Networking with Mgmt server ol8
Total time taken: 60102 seconds
Marvin logs: https://github.com/blueorangutan/acs-prs/releases/download/trillian/pr12124-t15110-kvm-ol8.zip
Smoke tests completed. 149 look OK, 1 have errors, 0 did not run
Only failed and skipped tests results shown below:

Test	Result	Time (s)	Test File
test_03_deploy_and_scale_kubernetes_cluster	Failure	27.81	test_kubernetes_clusters.py

[DaanHoogland]

@mhkadhum , it looks like you are ready to merge. If you wish to ignore my latest comments please let us know. (cc @abh1sar ).

[mhkadhum]

@mhkadhum , it looks like you are ready to merge. If you wish to ignore my latest comments please let us know. (cc @abh1sar ).

Lets go ahead with the merge
Thank you

[abh1sar]

@mhkadhum , it looks like you are ready to merge. If you wish to ignore my latest comments please let us know. (cc @abh1sar ).

Lets go ahead with the merge
Thank you

I am going to do some regression testing. Should be finished by tomorrow.

[abh1sar]

@mhkadhum , it looks like you are ready to merge. If you wish to ignore my latest comments please let us know. (cc @abh1sar ).

Lets go ahead with the merge
Thank you

I am going to do some regression testing. Should be finished by tomorrow.

Tested common object storage workflows with Ceph.
Add/Delete Object Store. Create/Update/Delete Bucket. Working as expected.

@mhkadhum Please answer any pending comments and we can move forward with this.

[mhkadhum]

@mhkadhum , it looks like you are ready to merge. If you wish to ignore my latest comments please let us know. (cc @abh1sar ).

Lets go ahead with the merge
Thank you

I am going to do some regression testing. Should be finished by tomorrow.

Tested common object storage workflows with Ceph. Add/Delete Object Store. Create/Update/Delete Bucket. Working as expected.

@mhkadhum Please answer any pending comments and we can move forward with this.

Hi @abh1sar ,
I have addressed all queries and comments.I believe we are ready to proceed with this.

[abh1sar]

LGTM

[abh1sar]

@blueorangutan package

[DaanHoogland]

@blueorangutan package

[blueorangutan]

@DaanHoogland a [SL] Jenkins job has been kicked to build packages. It will be bundled with no SystemVM templates. I'll keep you posted as I make progress.

[abh1sar]

@mhkadhum please fix build errors
EcsObjectStoreDriverImpl.java:120: Line has trailing spaces. [RegexpSingleline]

[mhkadhum]

@mhkadhum please fix build errors EcsObjectStoreDriverImpl.java:120: Line has trailing spaces. [RegexpSingleline]

Missed the pre-commit hook. Fixed and pushed.

[blueorangutan]

Packaging result [SF]: ✖️ el8 ✖️ el9 ✖️ debian ✖️ suse15. SL-JID 16355

[abh1sar]

@blueorangutan package

[blueorangutan]

@abh1sar a [SL] Jenkins job has been kicked to build packages. It will be bundled with no SystemVM templates. I'll keep you posted as I make progress.