Why PayPal Chose OpenStack 64
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.'"
Openstack bias (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? (Score:5, 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.
Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? (Score:5, 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.