Why PayPal Chose OpenStack

So, what the hell is Open Stack? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 00:08 · Score: -1

Can someone explain what the hell is Open Stack? Some sort of platform / UI to control multiple VMs or what?

Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? by afidel · 2013-08-30 00:31 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

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Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? by wisnoskij · 2013-08-30 01:42 · Score: 1

Why would anyone ever want to have large scale virtual machines, other than web service providers, that sell you a virtual server to do with what you will?
If you want to manage your company, and your users, and perform calculations, and transfer funds, adding on a whole new layer of overhead has to be the stupidest idea I have ever heard of.

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Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? by afidel · 2013-08-30 01:55 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? by Charliemopps · 2013-08-30 01:56 · Score: 4, Interesting

Not if you want things to scale easily. I think a good example is SOE. They have a bunch of MMOs and years ago they virtualized their servers. Now it's completely irrelevant how many players are playing any particular game they have. If they have even 1 paying customer a limited amount of resources is dedicated to the server side of that players gameplay. If the population suddenly shoots up to 100,000 it just scales up assets dedicated to that game. It's brilliant really and is why SOE has been able to keep decades old games going for so long. None of their hardware is application specific.
In a non-virtualized environment once the player population fell bellow a few thousand it would not longer be profitable for them to keep the game running and they've have to shut it down... and lose all those customers.
Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 01:57 · Score: 0

you ask a valid question, and normally i would respond, but throw a backhand in and, nope! but your assertion is quite ignorant.
Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 01:59 · Score: 2, Informative

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.
Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 01:59 · Score: 0

It's to do with flexibility. Maybe I have services that can't co-exist but their busy period doesn't overlap. Maybe I have some servers that are rarely used so they can all take advantage of an over-committed physical CPU. Maybe I have lots of development environments where performance is hugely important, or I just need the ability to fire up another server for testing purposes, maybe for a matter of hours, days or weeks and buying in new hardware isn't justified.
Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? by Richard_at_work · 2013-08-30 02:03 · Score: 1

In the main? Generalising hardware, making it a commodity, especially in the Windows world - having multiple redundant systems quickly gets to be a pain in the arse once you stop having identical hardware, you can't simply move a system to a larger hardware platform because that brings with it a lot of caveats in terms of non-identical hardware (does it perform the same, have the same overheads, have the same cascade effects etc).
Moving to an internally virtualised environment standardises the hardware aspect, or rather it moves it's concern to that of the virtualisation layer - to the guest, it looks the same regardless. Makes having redundant systems much easier, makes having a production-identical UAT environment much easier, and it makes having an offsite business continuity environment much easier - build the environment once, deploy it many times in isolation.
Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? by wisnoskij · 2013-08-30 02:07 · Score: 1

SO basically VMs do the job that OSes are supposed to do?

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Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? by Synerg1y · 2013-08-30 02:56 · Score: 1

Now for the real question...
How does virtual machine automation help paypal's release cycle???
That part doesn't make sense to me. It has the potential to save them money and better manage and trend their VM environment, but... faster reaction times? What they can't clone a VM in a timely manner? It certainly won't write code for them, oh well, IT buzzwords ftw.
Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? by Richard_at_work · 2013-08-30 03:00 · Score: 2

Not really, there's a world of difference between the two. It's really a case of bringing portability, redundancy and scalability to a whole raft of applications which didn't have it before, and simplifying it dramatically in the process.
I don't think any OS below the million dollar mark has supported moving running processes and environments between actual independent hardware nodes with little or no interruption, and now you can have that with a free OS and a little configuration.
No longer do you have to wait for your vendor to send over a part in order to stop a critical system running in degraded mode - just allocate that VM to a sdifferent node in your cloud cluster, if it wasn't done automatically for you...
Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? by tnk1 · 2013-08-30 05:17 · Score: 2

I agree. When I read about their 15 minute rule I was like: "Well that's nice, but are deployments really where they are losing time in reacting to competitors?"
Having been involved in production deployments for over 15 years now, I can tell you that deployment time is pretty much a non-issue with speed to market. Things like VMs and storage options and all of that make for easier, and less risky deployments, I agree. However, I have never heard of a piece of software that was ready for prod that was waiting for more than a simple scheduled maintenance window in order for it to go out. Maybe some of the more complex deployments might have required a week at most to practice and get the scripts right. That's it.
Compare that to the weeks and months that marketing, product management, development, QA testers are working on features and it is insignificant.
When I do a deployment, I'm perfectly willing to do 8 hours of prep work to make sure that my customers could get 5 minutes less downtime, and preferably no downtime. Rushing things into production from test is like spending your R&D budget on improving fuel efficiency from 50 to 51 MPG while you spend nothing on getting 12 MPG trucks up to a respectable 18 or something. Where is the real time savings?
If this is Paypal's solution by itself, I predict that they will remain behind the curve going forward as well. Maybe they should figure out how to improve their development process?
Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? by AJodock · 2013-08-30 09:47 · Score: 1

Compare that to the weeks and months that marketing, product management, development, QA testers are working on features and it is insignificant.
Where is all of this development and QA testing going on? The point of a cloud is to build and automated image that can be deployed to any of your environments. Presumably you are architecting your applications so that they scale as well which the cloud is excellent for.
For example the dev team is done with their changes and want to push from the dev environment to UAT. Say you have two instances in UAT. instead of shutting down, updating your code, starting up each machine one at a time you just deploy 2 new instances. The deploy script fires off a test or two to make sure that the app started successfully. If you are doing something web related it hits the API on the load balancer to add the new nodes in, maybe fires off a couple of tests against the VIP, removes the old nodes, a couple more tests against the VIP, and just like that your deployment is complete. If you are doing something messaging related where your services communicate over a message bus of some kind presumably your apps just connect themselves. QA can then test, and determine if the code is ready to promote to production.
Of course this all sounds a bit over complicated for a UAT environment, but once you have every single piece of the puzzle automated that is when things get interesting. Lets say that your source control allows you to mark your projects as "ready for UAT", and allows your QAs to mark them as ready for production. You can just have your entire test system rebuild itself every day and production releases once a week through the same process. Also since you are in a position to scale either through your load balancer or a messaging bus you can use the same processes to scale.
Say your monitoring service watches CPU usage on your web app servers, and as soon as you hit 75% it fires up another instance. If load continues to come in after the new node is online then fire up another one. If the CPU drops below what is required to run on n-1 nodes then hit that load balancer API take a node out and destroy it.
Even if you don't need to scale doing deployments often means shutting down apps on one node at a time. If you design everything for n+1 nodes that means that during your deployments you are still running fine, but you are "at risk"
From a sysadmin perspective this is all great because a machine going down means nothing. Your monitoring services see that the VMs are offline, and they fire up another instance wherever there is extra CPU cycles. Without a "cloud" this is easy to do with VMware as long as you have shared storage, but do you trust the VM? It died while the system was running what if something was corrupted? With the cloud you don't care about the old instance, just let it die. Create a new one instead.
Everyone loves VMs due to live migration but why not take that one step further to save yourself some money while you are at it. Skip the extra cards/ports/networks/switches/cables for iSCSI/FC, skip the expensive SAN and pack the hosts with some cheap SSDs. You don't need to migrate when you can just redeploy (although many of the hypervisors support moving images without shared storage now). This way you get local read/write speeds which will probably beat any SAN that you don't have to sell your first born to buy.
Backups also become much easier. Backup the images (which won't change often), and the source control systems, and you are pretty much set (maybe a couple of 1 off monitoring and deployment servers). Why bother with expensive dedup/compression appliances when you just have a few images to backup. DBs are an obvious exception there.
Speaking of DBs lets say you want to rebase one of your lower environments off of a higher one. Lets say you want to refresh the dev DBs with the test DB data. You just hit the api and take a snapshot of the test DB data image. Clone the that snapshot to a new image, shutdown your DB node, unattach the old image, reattach the clone, and start it back up. All of which can be an automated process. No pestering the DBAs to do it for you.
Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? by Synerg1y · 2013-09-04 05:13 · Score: 1

A couple of points for you:
Adding VMs to the development cycle is just adding an unnecessary level of complexity. Need a new environment? Use an existing web server to set up a new site, they're designed for this and it's the proper layer to solve that at.
Also, scalable apps work via shared services, this is on top of the VM layer, so again we just don't care.
There are advantages to rapidly deploying VMs... and thus something like VMWare has templated VMs to make the process 15 minutes, my main point is that none of those advantages have anything to do with the development cycle whatsoever... remember the only significant portion of paypal's IT infrastructure is their website through which they do 100% of their business, so when we talk about increasing efficiency and reaction time for paypal, things like business intelligence and improving the development cycle come to mind... VM automation is well outside of that and won't help them add features faster to their site.

Openstack bias by Drewdad · 2013-08-30 00:14 · Score: 5, Interesting

No articles on Credit Suisse's decision not to use OpenStack and their rationale for not doing so? On my own head be it, I suppose....

Re:Openstack bias by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 00:32 · Score: 0

Do you have a link to a good report of this story to share with us?
Re:Openstack bias by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 00:55 · Score: 3, Informative

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."
Re:Openstack bias by Lennie · 2013-08-30 01:01 · Score: 1

So basically:
We already using something, we've invested into a solution which works for us, why invest again ?

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Re:Openstack bias by mzito · 2013-08-30 01:03 · Score: 4, Informative

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"

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Re:Openstack bias by bhalter80 · 2013-08-30 02:57 · Score: 1

Credit Suisse did their own inhouse development that they spun off in DynamicOps which is now VMWare's vCAC product
Re:Openstack bias by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 05:50 · Score: 0

Very well put- considerations like the use of SQL Server 2012 to leverage newer technologies will put you at risk of memory ballooning problems without Hyper-V if not careful. This happens more while trying to scale out and I'm sure there are other bad combinations out there too so being hypervisor agnostic is necessary. Unless you feel comfortable locking your pages in memory consider the high I/O throughput required, I see SaaS working exceptionally well given these conditions and that's where OpenStack shines being able to mix it up a little.
Re:Openstack bias by placated · 2013-08-30 06:29 · Score: 1

You make some good points here. Its important to note that most of the time 'traditional' workloads are best left to a solution like VMWare. Openstack is built to run API provisioned, horizontally scaled, stateless workloads. Openstack doesn't have functionality that traditional server infrastructure requires like automated resource load balancing, high availability, or workload placement. If these things exist in Openstack they are static and need to be manually configured. Here is a simple test as to if Openstack is right for you. Ask yourself "If one of my Openstack Nova nodes blows up and all the workloads on it vaporize, does that bother me?" If your answer is "Hell yes it matters" then Openstack is not for you. Go talk to VMWare. If your application is horizontally scaled, load balanced, and makes extensive use of stateless API driven development, and can handle frequent losses of individual nodes then by all means adopt Openstack. Openstack is not for everyone at this point. I cringe at the Sysadmin who adopts Openstack thinking its "free VMWare" They are totally different computing models and have totally different use cases.
Re:Openstack bias by mzito · 2013-08-30 06:42 · Score: 1

I don't know why people are making this a VMware -OR- OpenStack decision, or keep touting VMware's capabilities.
If all you want is easy virtualization and are willing to pay a lot for it, VMware is the easiest solution.
If you want to build your own EC2, because you believe that's core to your business, VMware is a terrible way to go about it. Openstack may not be the right solution either, you may want Eucalyptus or CloudStack or one of the many commercial cloud providers. The model is different.
But it's a *business* decision, not a technical one, at its core. VMware is contributing code to OpenStack, while bashing it, while OpenStack is pushing to replace VMware, while also sitting on top of it. It's a complicated world.
Disclaimer: I do cloud strategy for a company that makes a cloud management software product, so these are my own opinions,

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Re:Openstack bias by Cramer · 2013-08-30 14:34 · Score: 1

Preach, brother. Vmware's "vCloud" is a huge, complicated load of crap. I would like to say it's easier to install and use than OpenStack, but I've dealt with both... I'd almost rather quit my 6-figure job to flip burgers than deal with either of them. (and yes, there are companies that sell virtual infrastructure using vCloud. and that speaks *volumes* about how horrible openstack was to setup at the time.)
The strength of OpenStack is in it's "free". (and thanks to a number of distros, it's getting much easier to install) The strength of VMware is a long list of powerful features (vmotion, HA, Fault Tolerance, etc) and near brainless simplicity to install and setup -- esxi: 5min, vcenter appliance: under 30min.
Re:Openstack bias by placated · 2013-09-02 14:57 · Score: 1

Sorry, you're wrong The VMWare / Openstack decision is without a doubt a technical one. A technical decision that will grow to describe your entire development and deployment ecosystem. Please read my post again. Openstack has no concept of availability. It depends on you horizontally scaling your app, and not putting important data on the instances ephemeral storage. This is NOT a knock on Openstack -- I'm fairly certain this is by design. in fact if you can deploy applications in this fashion its much preferable than to the standard 'pets' model of instances that VMWare is so good at. Its just a totally different use case than VMWare. Not bad or good -- they shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence, but they always seem to be. Apples and Oranges. Pets and Cattle.

Uh.... is Google broken? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 00:20 · Score: 0, Insightful

Seriously man. It's 2013. Open a new tab and type "Openstack".

How lazy can you get?

Re:Uh.... is Google broken? by Vernes · 2013-08-30 00:36 · Score: 2

Both AC's fail to notice the 2nd line explaining Open Stack.
Re:Uh.... is Google broken? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 02:29 · Score: -1

Google is utter garbage; don't use it.
Re:Uh.... is Google broken? by jekewa · 2013-08-30 03:23 · Score: 2

Oh...you mean they didn't RTFA?
Here, you lazy bums:
OpenStack is an IT infrastructure framework made up of several components contributed under an open source license by multiple technology providers.

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End the FUD
Re:Uh.... is Google broken? by michrech · 2013-08-30 03:51 · Score: 2

Thanks, Balmer! I'll keep that in mind next time...

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Re:Uh.... is Google broken? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 03:52 · Score: 0

Telling someone something sucks isn't typically an effective way of evoking change. Perhaps including some reasoning behind why "Google is utter garbage" and including an alternative that addresses those issues would be a better way of going about it.
Re:Uh.... is Google broken? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 04:10 · Score: 0

"OpenStack is an IT infrastructure framework made up of several components contributed under an open source license by multiple technology providers."
That doesn't explain a goddamn thing about what OpenStack does, it just gives a vague description of it as a framework made of components with no explanation of what either the framework or components actually do.
Re:Uh.... is Google broken? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 06:03 · Score: 0

Telling someone something sucks isn't typically an effective way of evoking change. Perhaps including some reasoning behind why "Google is utter garbage" and including an alternative that addresses those issues would be a better way of going about it.
Ya? Well, your answer is utter garbage; won't use it.

Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? by Gothmolly · 2013-08-30 00:37 · Score: 2

They have a single business, with a relatively constant, yet probably growing number of users. If they need 100 servers today, next year it will be 120. They don't need massive content or application distribution, they don't need to rush new products to market, they don't need all that cloudy stuff. If "OpenStack" just means they virtualized some old iron that's another story, but a far less interesting one.

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Re:Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 00:42 · Score: -1

Owned by eBay which I suppose requires a lot of infrastructure so makes sense to virtualize most of it... so assuming it shares the same infrastructure as eBay, this is a flow on.
Re:Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? by Gothmolly · 2013-08-30 00:47 · Score: 1

If it shares the infrastructure, then they don't need their own.

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Re:Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? by afidel · 2013-08-30 00:47 · Score: 2

FTFA:
"From the minute developers finish final QA in our dev space, they have 15 minutes to be live in front of customers on the PayPal website," Carlson said. "That means they put their innovation on the VM, they put the operating system on it, they put the app on it, they put on a load balancer, they fix the firewalls and its up."
and
The scalability of the OpenStack platform also offered a crucial advantage for when PayPal is forced to cope with sudden spikes in traffic.
"When [parent company] eBay has a free listing week, they don't necessarily pre-warn us at PayPal, but by the end of that week all of the payments suddenly flood in," said Carlson. "So our volume scales up in one day and goes away the next day."

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Re: Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? by Wovel · 2013-08-30 00:52 · Score: 1

Except where they said they do need to rush new products to market. PayPal still adds markets and services all the time...
Re:Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? by mzito · 2013-08-30 00:53 · Score: 4, Interesting

So - there's a couple of reasons why they would want their own cloud:
- Their business isn't actually very static. As you might imagine, they have daily spikes of traffic at particular times of day, likely early evening across the US. It might not be worthwhile for them to do elastic computing for that, but think about holiday times, like Christmas, and their purchase volume certainly goes up.
- Development environments - very often, developers will want a sandbox environment to use for a few weeks or months and then get rid of them. Or, they might want to run some analytics on 50-100 nodes and then tear them down
- Easier infrastructure lifecycle management - abstracting the running OS into a virtual machine makes it much easier to archive out old hardware and onboard new - just migrate the VMs over to a new machine, pull out the hardware, throw it away.
- Rightsizing hardware - cloud allows them to buy a small number of predictable builds and then size their compute to their needs - no need to dedicate an 8-core machine with 8 GB of RAM for an internal email server, or a sandbox to play with MySQL
PayPal actually has a very complex business, huge infrastructure, crazy security requirements, tons of applications and people, and is generally a technology heavy company.

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Re:Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 02:15 · Score: 0

As someone that's in a market very similar to PayPal (and often competing with them) I can see how this would be valuable. We just got finished buying $20k worth of servers to handle the expected spike when a projected major business tax deadline will happen right next to school registration. In a month all those servers will idle until the next time we have a weird event that tripples our load.
Re:Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? by mzito · 2013-08-30 02:25 · Score: 1

And this is why people use Amazon, despite the overall higher costs compared with owning your own hardware. Being able to dynamically spin up hardware for when it's needed, and spin it down when its not can be extremely useful.

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Re:Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 02:30 · Score: 0

I have a friend who toured eBay's data center and told me that they have $500M (or was it $800M) of servers in there!
Re:Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? by bad-badtz-maru · 2013-08-30 03:47 · Score: 1

You could've spun up Rackspace cloud servers, temporarily, to handle that load. There's no learning curve - pick the distro you want, the amount of RAM and storage, then log in and use it.
Re:Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? by tnk1 · 2013-08-30 05:30 · Score: 1

All of this is extremely important, but how does any of that affect their Time to Market? It doesn't.
I am a big proponent of VM or "cloud" infrastructures for the flexibility that they give you for capacity or repurposing resources on the fly.
However, none of that is particularly important for faster feature build outs. Product development times are usually so long that you could probably order, rack and stack actual boxes before some features even get out of development. Hardware is almost never the reason that something isn't ready on time, assuming that the product team communicated the capacity requirements. And if they can't communicate with you effectively, you have bigger problems than VMs or a cloud can save you from.
As for dev resources, back in the 20th Century, I could probably have ghosted up a dev server for someone in less than hour, and most people don't even need that kind of re-purposing to do their work, it's just a convenience. Possibly a detriment, since coders in their own environments frequently tend to ignore the need to program against the existing production infrastructure.
Most places I have worked would have to streamline their product development process by a factor of ten or something in order to even begin to make deployments a bottleneck.
OpenStack is interesting to me, but it is far from the long pole in the tent for Time to Market.
Re:Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? by mzito · 2013-08-30 06:01 · Score: 2

Some fair points, but here's my responses:
- "Deployments" doesn't only mean "rolling out new applications" wholesale. It could mean, "I want to test my new fraud analytics algorithm on our last six months of transaction history", or "We're adding a new feature that might be very popular", or "turns out our application is hitting a database bottleneck, we're working on figuring out why that is, till then, spin up three more read-only slaves to see if we can alleviate it"
- "Time to Market" covers a lot of scenarios - sure, yes, in the year-long development cycle for an entirely new application hardware procurement is a small percentage of the overall lifecycle. But how much hardware to procure? What datacenter should it live in? Can you accurately predict which portions of the application will be the busiest? Or slowest? In effect, in the same way a lot of organizations are using agile development methodologies to partition their work into smaller, faster, more responsive units, cloud computing environments allow for more agile infrastructure
- You say you can Ghost a server in an hour. Which is great. In more traditional environments though, you need to also configure network switches, firewall rules, load balancers, configure virtual IPs, backup schedules, provision storage, configure replication (possibly), add the node to monitoring, load application stacks, load code, adjust the app configuration, QA it, and then go live with it. In one of my customer environments, there are 13 separate agents that may have to be configured to run depending on what kind of server it is, and in which datacenter it's going to live, each with its own requirements, dependencies, and so on. In most environments, building out a server is going to take a lot longer than an hour.
BTW, I never said explicitly that "time to market" was one of the fundamental cloud benefits - I wouldn't use that term, as it's a little loaded. But I do think it gives you agility. Not everyone needs that - I was talking with a mining company a few years ago that had a decent enough infrastructure, but it was completely predictable. For every mine that opens, they need X servers. When a mine closes, they decommission X servers. They might still get *some* benefit from cloud, but it certainly wouldn't be worth the hassle of dealing with Openstack.

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Re:Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? by Lennie · 2013-08-30 09:10 · Score: 1

If you are or compete with PayPal you might have requirements of where your data is and who has access to this data which don't allow you to place it on servers outside of your own datacenters.

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New things are always on the horizon
Re:Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 09:59 · Score: 0

The problem is if you are busy the same time Amazon and everyone else is busy... And that's not that unlikely for many organizations.

Because... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 00:48 · Score: -1

All the real talent cashed out years ago and all that's left are noobs, yes men, and halfwits.

'openstack is new so it's got to improve the infrastructure metrics by 99%. Duh! That you would even need to ask prove that you're not very crommulent at all.'

Your bias is showing. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 01:25 · Score: 1

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"

He flat out said that he won't add another layer of complexity, requiring the increase his true cost of labor, because his present system is orders of magnitude cheaper! He also said that they challenge this assertion and third party cloudy computing and continue to prove it correct, at least for them, ever 12 to 18 months.

Orders of magnitude cheaper on a $1billion annual spend.

Re:Your bias is showing. by mzito · 2013-08-30 02:14 · Score: 2

Why would I be biased about OpenStack? I have no horse in this race. If VMware is "orders of magnitude" cheaper, good for them, go nuts. My point is just that there's a lot of moving parts in these decisions. What is true for one organization is not true for another. And look, those TCO calculations are messy.
Here's a story I like to tell. A friend of mine is head of server architecture at a very large company. They're a huge IBM shop, and they were deciding where to make their primary server investments over the next three years. They can do linux on the mainframe, AIX on P-series, or Linux on X-series. Which one is going to be the cheapest? Best ROI for their workloads? Best TCO over five years? He's got three IBM server reps, one for each platform. He tells each of them that he wants an in-depth TCO study done for their respective platform, based on their current skillsets, investments, technologies in use, etc. They do interviews, asset inventories, it takes a month and a half. At the end, he gets three reports back, one from each sales rep, each conclusively proving that *their* platform would be the cheapest . The numbers worked out, everything was written out clearly, nothing was made up or fudged. It's just that if you make a couple of slightly different assumptions, or weight things differently, you can come up with a totally different result.
Again, that doesn't mean that CS is wrong, it's just a question of where you want to spend your costs, and that TCO means different things to different people.
One thing I will quibble with - $1b is their capex spend annually, that's capital outlays on hardware and software for their entire IT organization. He said they saved orders of magnitude on their people costs to operate. A fraction of a fraction of their capex spend.

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me@mzi.to
Re: Your bias is showing. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 12:34 · Score: 0

People are a recuring expense. Hardware/Software are generally capital. All established, large companies are capital driven and try to keep opEx low.

Reasons not to use PayPal by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 01:29 · Score: 1

I can give you shitload of reasons as to why you should not use PayPal !!!!

Re: Reasons not to use PayPal by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 01:39 · Score: 4, Funny

Anonymous - check
"Shitload" - check
Not afraid of excessive punctuation - check
Congrats, you are my new financial advisor, call me.

You have to understand the technology by Stu101 · 2013-08-30 01:34 · Score: 2

Those involved in Virtualisation probably (or should have) known this anyhow.

The Hypervisor war is done. Pretty much everyone (VMware, MS, Citrix) have their new cloud based offerings that are agnostic towards the hypervisor that runs on the tin. If you have played with vClould Automation Center for example, there are multiple options for the hypervisor types including Citrix. The bottom line is there is not much more to add to to hyervisor and there is also less money in the hypervisor. It is an old (mature?) technology.

The new hot button is the tools to manage the infrastructure and that is where the real war is going to be won or lost.

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http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.

F&*k Paypal by __aasehi2499 · 2013-08-30 02:25 · Score: 0

That is all there is to it. Who cares what tech or software they are using when they are the best example of how to be a ripoff bank on the net. Their policies and politically minded actions against the people are all that matter. They suck and no one should utilize them...ever. No AC here, mod me down all day till I have negative karma, I don't care. Paypal is shite and everybody knows it, some people make a little money using that sham of a financial institution and the money drives their thoughts.

Re:F&*k Paypal by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 03:02 · Score: 0

Works just fine.
Chill out, dude.
Re: F&*k Paypal by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 04:33 · Score: 0

Actually my business just switched away from PayPal. Reasons includes:
- Their website is crippling slow
- Their website interface is slow
- It takes a long time for their website to load

the real story by Gravis+Zero · 2013-08-30 03:28 · Score: 1

i think the real story here is that a large business actually realized the benefits of open source are greater than the ability to play the blame game by paying for vendor support.

then again, maybe grumpy cat is really in charge of IT.

--
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.

Here's why PayPal uses OpenStack by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 03:36 · Score: 0

All of these reasons are correct. Plus there's one intangible benefit you missed.

Developers need quick access to OS images and a software stack representative of what might be on a given production server. Now you can spin up whatever OS you like and install whatever software you need in less time than it takes to download an ISO.

The production environment must be able to respond quickly and elastically to spikes in demand for services. Now it can.

Anyone can custom-configure a VM with appropriate hardware requirements for the application(s) running on the VM. If you don't need 8 GBs of RAM, set the VM to use 4 GBs. If you only need 20 GBs of disk, you don't need to use 80 GBs and waste resources. But if you need 32 GBs RAM and a terabyte of storage (or more), you can have it (within reason) and you can have it in 5 minutes.

One intangible benefit of the above that didn't get mentioned is that now access to a hefty server (one or 25 of them, whatever you need) is available to anyone without getting pushback from management or IT, thereby "democratizing" IT functions. Sweet freedom!

If you think this is purely a PayPal thingy, think again. It's a strategic company-wide initiative. All of eBay and its myriad divisions now have these capabilities. I hope eBay's competitors quake in their boots.

This setup is pretty cool and much appreciated.

Many Bothans died to bring you this information. I'm a Bothan, and I want to live. You didn't hear any of this from me. I'm an anonymous coward for a reason. :)

re: I LOVE Paypal by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 03:45 · Score: 0

really .. tell us how you feel about it.

Geek Culture by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 03:49 · Score: 0

Did they decide on OpenStack via wrestling match?

Please tell me Paypal Competitors. by cellurl · 2013-08-30 04:55 · Score: 1

This is a good opportunity to get a nice list of Paypal Competitors. I have no clue. Any suggestions appreciated.

Free Road Rage Reducer

The most important part of this post. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-30 07:39 · Score: 0

The most important part of this post is that he mentions that Paypal have competitors!

Please, I would love to know more about these!

64 comments