KeepCalmStudio.com-[Feet]-Keep-Calm-And-Run-Enterprise-Apps-On-Openstack

I have proposed a panel talk for the upcoming OpenStack Summit on running Enterprise Applications on OpenStack clouds. Towards that discussion, I thought it would be great to highlight some of the known enterprise application use cases. Please note that this will contain only published or publicly available information. If you want to have your use case highlighted, please comment or follow up via email.

Paypal

paypal

What more could be a better way to start this series than highlighting Paypal? eBay Inc’ s Subbu will be on the panel where we will learn more insights firsthand. Until then, read more here or here. You should also check out his HongKong summit presentation.

Application

Paypal is employing OpenStack based Private cloud to support key areas of mobility, payments, credit, merchants and the web operation. While it is not clear what percentage of their entire stack on OpenStack private cloud as of now, from the information available as of Dec 2012, their intent was to cover upto 90% of some these areas. In terms of technology stack, these translate to node.js, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python of course.

Business Goals

  • Four 9’s of availability supporting payments from multiple types of devices in 190 different markets with 25 different currencies
  • Agility without sacrificing Availability

Why OpenStack?

  • Agility,
  • Choice
  • APIs/ open source
  • Ability to support multiple hypervisors

Multiple Hypervisors

Paypal had previously invested on VMware. While there are contradictory public reports that it has completely replaced VMware with OpenStack, or not, it is key to note that OpenStack supports multiple hypervisors. And this should have definitely helped to make the choice.

Agility

Paypal has the famous “15 minutes rule” set for its developers, where a developer has only 15 minutes to have her code live in front of the customer after it passes QA. OpenStack supports this kind of pace.

Choice/ APIs/ open source

OpenStack supports the ability to pick and choose various components — network, storage, orchestration etc. It played out well for Paypal’s private cloud. Also, the opensource tools available around OpenStack, for example Nagios to monitor, also helped in favor of OpenStack.

Challenges

Take a look at Paypal slides on their implementation or their presentation during the HongKong summit.

Their challenges were mainly around availability zones in a multi tenant environments. They also had to fine tune nova for their specific requirements (such as unique instance host naming, rack aware networking etc). It is not clear if they had multiple availability zones within a region, but they needed visibility across multiple region behind single load balancer. This also hints they had single keystone service across multiple regions (through an LDAP backend).

They also innovated around LBaaS, UX, DNSaaS, it will be cool when they are moved upstream.

Factoids

  • POC built with 2 engineers in 8 weeks
  • 1 region per datacenter,
  • 96 compute nodes in a rack
  • 2 flavors of VMs, 12–16 VMs per host ~ 1300 VMs per rack

Summary

Paypal’s implementation has been impressive; developer driven, hands on hacking, built internal (that is without any support from professional services), and handling commercial, enterprise workloads. This is definitely a great use case for OpenStack!

[Last updated at 03/17/2014 7.33 pm to reflect Subbu’s eBay Inc. affiliation correctly.]