OpenStack Summit: Rackspace, Red Hat Enterprise Cloud Pitch

At the OpenStack Summit, the big theme is "the year of the user" and enterprises deploying the cloud service. Here's a keynote recap involving Red Hat, Rackspace, Comcast, Best Buy, Bloomberg, Hubspot and more.

April 16, 2013

5 Min Read
OpenStack leader Jonathan Bryce shifted the conversation from vendors to actual users like Best Buy Bloomberg and Comcast
OpenStack leader Jonathan Bryce shifted the conversation from vendors to actual users like Best Buy, Bloomberg and Comcast.

By samdizzy

The OpenStack Summit is "going enterprise" according to the opening keynote session that featured cloud user case studies from Comcast, Bloomberg, Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) and Hubspot. Rackspace (NYSE:RAX) Senior VP Jim Curry said this is "the year of the user" for OpenStack. Next up is a Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) keynote. The overall big theme: OpenStack is more than a developer movement; it's also ready to help enterprises and cloud services providers (CSPs) that want to make money, according to keynote speakers.

Here's a keynote recap.

Jonathan Bryce, leader of the OpenStack Foundation

  • Foundation started in Sept. 2012

  • The foundation also launched the Gnome Outreach Program for Women, which has helped women to get involved with OpenStack

  • The foundation will have an open house on Thursday to solicit more ideas on where the foundation can go next.

  • "Six months ago we had a peaceful transition of power over to the foundation."

  • And in the past month, technical leaders like Vish Ishaya, Brian Waldon, Dan Wendlandt and Joe Heck transitioned their leadership to other members. 

  • "We now have new leaders who are stepping up, which speaks to the technical depth of our bench."

  • "We are building a platform ecosystem for the cloud."

  • A successful ecosystem needs powerful software, an innovative ecosystem and successful users. He mentioned iOS and Android smartphones as successful ecosystems.

  • Interesting: He mentioned OpenStack focused on compute, storage and networking — sounds like the software defined datacenter.

  • Grizzly is the 7th major release, delivered on time with all the major features.

An OpenStack Timeline from Bryce:

  • July 2010: First OpenStack announcement to open source the software. 

  • April 16, 2013: Major media, major entertainment and major communications companies are now leveragjng OpenStack. The user stories will surface at the conference.

  • Next OpenStack Summit will be Nov. 2013 in Hong Kong.

Bloomberg Recap

  • The financial services company is really a technology company.

  • On a given day, they send out 22 million instant messages. 

  • The company has 20,000 routers on its private WAN.

  • The company has 22 million lines of javascript code on the server side.

  • Key focus on OpenStack involves high availability, plus scaling down to small sizes and points of presence around the world.

  • Bloomberg has shared its OpenStack learnings here: www.github.com/bloomberg/chef-bcpc

Best Buy Recap

  • The company's new cloud architecture leverages OpenStack. The old architecture required anywhere from 7 to 30 seconds to load a product page. Today's architecture takes 2.5 seconds to load. 

  • Best Buy has 40 developer teams working in parallel. The company will be hosting a break-out session to describe the cloud effort more fully.

  • Best Buy is shifting to nimble developer teams who work in parallel, rather than "centers of excellence" because such centers sometimes lack excellence, the company representatives quipped.

Comcast Recap: Mark Muehl, senior VP of product engineering

  • Comcast Cable and NBCUniversal

  • Historically, video development stack has been vertically integrated on closed hardware and software. Most of the consumer experience was accomplished on the set-top box.

  • About a year ago, Comcast started looking for open alternatives. 

  • An OpenStack production cloud allows the intelligence to live on the network, pushing updates to the set-top boxes. "The plan was to move the intelligence out of the set-top box and into the cloud."

  • Users who search the set-top box for content (i.e., movies) now leverage information from cloud-based databases without even knowing it.

Recap: Rackspace and Hubspot

  • Featuring Jim Curry, OpenStack Co-founder and SVP/GM, Rackspace

  • "OpenStack is being used and it works."

  • Rackspace's OpenStack cloud has had 99.94 percent availability.

  • Rackspace released version 3 of its OpenStack private cloud software three weeks ago; it has since had about 8,000 downloads (I missed the actual number).

  • Rackspace wants to make sure OpenStack clouds are federated together worldwide.

  • Rackspace's relative code contributions to OpenStack has gone down because third-party contributions are growing even faster.

  • 45 companies contributed to the OpenStack Grizzly release.

  • It's the year of the user, Curry said, before handing the keynote over to Hubspot.

Recap: Hubspot

  • 8,500 customers — cloud-based marketing software; Rackspace customer since 2007.

  • The fast-growth company couldn't keep pace with deploying dozens and dozens of new servers each week.

  • Hubspot had a 2 percent public cloud instance fail rate, and 20 percent instance turnover. 

  • Target uptime is 99.99%. To get to four-nines Hubspot needs more control amid server chaos.

  • 95 percent of our stack is now open source. "I  want it to be 100 percent."

  • Diablo deployment in Nov. 2011 had nine servers and 108 cores.

  • Essex deployment had 16 servers and 224 cores in 8/2012.

  • With Grizzly, extending to full bare metal — having the exact image running locally and in the public cloud. "Applications don't need to care where they run any more. And that's game-changing."

  • 4X increase in ifficiency when processing workloads.

Recap: Red Hat's Brian Stevens

  • Red Hat assigned its first developer to OpenStack in 2011.

  • On Aug. 25, 2011, Stevens sent a memo within Red Hat saying the company had to go all-in on OpenStack.

  • In 2012, the Essex shipment included Red Hat code.

  • "Open Source is not a business model; it's the best development model on the planet because of the collaboration and users win because they are in control."

  • A year before Red Hat got involved in OpenStack, the company got involved with Amazon's cloud. The result was OpenShift, a platform as a service for running on Amazon.

  • Next step: Red Hat is promoting OpenShift on OpenStack.

Talkin' Cloud will also be meeting with Canonical, HP, Mirantis and other OpenStack companies at the conference.

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