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.'"

Comments

Openstack bias

[Drewdad]

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

[mzito]

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"

Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack?

[afidel]

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.

Re:Why does Paypal need "cloud" ?

[mzito]

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.

Re: Reasons not to use PayPal

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous - check
"Shitload" - check
Not afraid of excessive punctuation - check

Congrats, you are my new financial advisor, call me.

Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack?

[afidel]

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.

Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack?

[Charliemopps]

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.