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.'"
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Oh...you mean they didn't RTFA?
Here, you lazy bums:
OpenStack [openstack.org] is an IT infrastructure framework made up of several components contributed under an open source license by multiple technology providers.
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Thanks, Balmer! I'll keep that in mind next time...
Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? (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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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.
Re:So, what the hell is Open Stack? (Score:5, 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.
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.
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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 automat
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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 asp
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SO basically VMs do the job that OSes are supposed to do?
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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
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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.
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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 wa
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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
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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 t
Openstack bias (Score:5, Interesting)
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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."
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So basically:
We already using something, we've invested into a solution which works for us, why invest again ?
Re:Openstack bias (Score:5, 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"
Your bias is showing. (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.
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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 in
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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
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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
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Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? (Score:3)
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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If it shares the infrastructure, then they don't need their own.
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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 fre
Re: Why does Paypal need "cloud" ? (Score:2)
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" ? (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.
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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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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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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.
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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 rea
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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 sc
Reasons not to use PayPal (Score:1)
I can give you shitload of reasons as to why you should not use PayPal !!!!
Re: Reasons not to use PayPal (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 (Score:3)
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.
the real story (Score:2)
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. [fastly.net]
Please tell me Paypal Competitors. (Score:1)
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