Slashdot Mirror
Why PayPal Chose OpenStack
AlbanX writes in with this story about Paypal's use of OpenStack. "PayPal's IT team has taken control of its technology release cycle by shifting key components of its IT infrastructure onto OpenStack. For PayPal, the decision to use components of OpenStack was based around speed to market. It allows the payments provider to untether its release cycle from those of vendor partners. 'PayPal has not historically been known for its fast reactions,' PayPal senior engineer Scott Carlson conceded to attendees at the VMworld conference in San Francisco this week. 'It has taken us six to nine months sometimes to react to our competitors.'"
It's a collection of open source API's for the management and automation of virtual machines at scale. It can be used with a number of hypervisors including VMWare vsphere, Xen, KVM, Hyper-V and a few others.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
http://diginomica.com/2013/08/27/credit-suisse-cio-perspective/
"I’ve got 15,000, 20,000 VDI systems running on VMware. I’ve got probably another 30,000 virtual servers, 25,000 to 30,000. ... The money we spend with integrated stack like VMware pays for itself, magnitudes, like hundreds of times when it comes to my people’s cost to run it."
Well, VDI is not an openstack use case. But even the traditional use case - it's a purely business decision. They believe that the cost to run and operate VMware is lower than the cost to run and operate Openstack. I know a couple of very large enterprises who have come to that conclusion. I also know one or two that went with openstack and wish they hadn't. Then I know a couple who love their openstack deployment.
The key thing here is that VMware and Openstack are not really 1:1 comparison points. You can run Openstack on top of VMware vsphere. Why would you do this? You want amazon-like APIs, a real storage service, DRS, and so on. Or you could run it on top of Xen or KVM and save money, but lose functionality. Or you could go out and buy RH's Openstack implementation.
This is a very complex series of decisions, and it's not really easy or possible to say, "Well, we didn't decide to do Openstack because VMware is better"
me@mzi.to
In the paypal use case they could use it to take an internal image and burst it quickly into a cloud provider to scale up their capacity as they see demand spiking beyond what their internal resources can accommodate (not saying they are doing this, just that it's a possible application). For a typical enterprise it's useful to allow on demand lab creation for developers, snapshot the current production machines and generate an isolated sandbox that accurately mirrors the production environment. Automated unit testing is another popular use of API driven provisioning. If you can't find a use for automation in your environment it's either too small to qualify (I'm in this boat, we're fairly big at over 300 VM's at our main site but still too small for much automation) or you're not thinking outside your current box.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Because many companies have many products and development efforts going on at any given time. Because many companies have weeks- or months-long provisioning cycles for new physical servers.
Because as the summary says, having a platform allowing for rapid (consistent) deployment of infrastructure like development, test, and production servers allows companies faster time to market on their major development efforts.
Because as you may have heard, software-defined infrastructure allows you to leverage automation to a much greater extent than with physical servers, allowing you to literally provision 100 identically configured servers in a couple hours for a server farm with just a couple commands.
Because if you can't see the benefit in allowing that, you aren't qualified to express an opinion about the wisdom of the approach.