North Korea Builds Cloud Infrastructure Using Apache CloudStack

It has been confirmed that North Korea has built a cloud computing system based on Apache CloudStack, managed by the Apache Software Foundation.

According to sources familiar with North Korea, researchers from Kim Il Sung University submitted a paper titled “Method for Improving the Performance of a Cloud Computing System by Adjusting the Characteristics of the Virtual Machine Manager” to the Journal of Information Science, Volume 71, Issue 1, 2025. North Korea refers to cloud computing as cloud computing.

The North Korean researchers explained in the paper that they proposed a method to enhance cloud system performance by adjusting the characteristics of the virtual machine manager, enabling the client virtual machine CPU to fully utilize modern CPU functions. A virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a computing environment using virtualization technology.

For example, while a traditional system could run five operating environments on five servers, cloud computing technology allows connecting five servers and running seven to eight operating environments using virtualization technology. The computing environment running in a cloud environment is called a VM. The North Korean researchers improved VM management methods to enhance performance.

North Korean researchers introduced Apache CloudStack as an open-source cloud operating environment enabling the construction of arbitrary cloud types (private, public, hybrid) and stated they utilized this technology.

CloudStack is an open-source-based cloud computing infrastructure platform. Cloud.com developed CloudStack. After Citrix acquired Cloud.com, CloudStack was donated to the Apache Software Foundation, making it available as open source.

North Korean researchers explained that CloudStack's software architecture consists of seven components: the CloudStack management server, Availability Zone, Pod, Cluster, Compute Nodes (CNs), Primary Storage System, and Secondary Storage System. They also explained that CloudStack supports hypervisors such as KVM, VMware vSphere, and Citrix XenServer.

North Korean researchers stated they evaluated the performance of virtual machines (VMs) deployed on CloudStack's orchestration and provisioning agents by running two applications on the VMs. They used KVM as the hypervisor and a cloud infrastructure architecture based on Apache CloudStack 4.6.0.

In the conclusion, the research team stated that the proposed optimization method was realized in the CloudStack operating environment and could also be implemented in other cloud operating environments.

They claimed that when using Intel Linpack, a program measuring Intel CPU computational performance, a 10% performance improvement was confirmed. When tested with the video conversion program HandBrake, performance improved by approximately two times compared to the previous state.

North Korean media reported that Kim Il Sung University and Kim Chaek University of Technology have established cloud computing systems. However, the specific technologies and solutions employed remained undisclosed. This paper confirms the use of Apache CloudStack. It is presumed that North Korea utilizes open-source-based CloudStack, likely considering solution implementation costs and security concerns.

* 이 내용은 인공지능 서비스 DeepL에 의해 번역된 것입니다.

This article was translated by the artificial intelligence service DeepL.