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Boston Superuser Awards Nominee: City Network

City Network is a nominee for the Superuser Awards to be presented at the OpenStack Summit Boston, May 8-11.

March 29, 2017
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It’s time for the community to help determine the winner of the Superuser Award to be presented at the OpenStack Boston Summit. Based on the community voting, the Superuser Editorial Advisory Board will review the nominees and determine the finalists and overall winner.

Now, it’s your turn.

City Network is among the seven nominees for the Superuser Awards. Review the nomination criteria below, check out the other nominees and rate the nominees before the deadline Tuesday, April 4 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time Zone.

Please specify the team and organization for nomination.

City Network’s Operations and DevOps team: Marcus Murwall, Tobias Rydberg, Magnus Bergman, Petter Lund, Tobias Johansson, Alexander Roos, Jimmy Bergman, Johan Hedberg, Joakim Johansson.

How has OpenStack transformed City Network’s business?

City Network is a leading provider of infrastructure services in Europe with data centers in 27 locations around the world. Shifting to a 100 percent focus on OpenStack has been key to the global expansion of our organization in general and our cloud offerings in particular. With OpenStack and all its features—ease of use and popularity as the—we have added value through multiple data centers in Europe, the U.S. and Asia, as well as a clear strategy and implementation for data protection and regulatory aspects. With OpenStack, we also get the benefit of providing open APIs, which prohibits our customers to be locked in with only us as an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider. It’s easy for the customer to start and easy to leave, as we are convinced that this is a must for all providers in order to stay relevant going forward. 

How have you participated in or contributed to the OpenStack community?

In 2016 we initiated and organized the first ever OpenStack Days Nordic event in Stockholm, and this year, we are once again leading the way to take the event to Copenhagen. We have also participate in the OpenStack Summit user groups for the public cloud and the security project.

What open source technologies does the organization use in its IT environment?

We are currently using CentOS, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, Nginx, Apache, php, Python, Ansible, MySQL, Mariadb, Mongodb, Ceph and Solaris.

What is the scale of your OpenStack deployment?

We run our public OpenStack based cloud in eight regions across three continents. All of our data centers are interconnected via private networks. Apart from our public cloud, we run a Pan-European cloud for the finance vertical solving all regulatory challenges. Over 2,000 users of our IaaS solutions run over 10,000 cores in production.

What kind of operational challenges have you overcome during your experience with OpenStack?

Since we are running OpenStack as a public IaaS, there have been a lot of hurdles to overcome as OpenStack is not yet fully adapted for public clouds. We had to build our own APIs in order to get network connectivity over several sites to work, and we also had to add features such as volume copy and the ability to move volumes between regions. We have also had our fair share of issues with upgrading to new OpenStack versions, however we do feel as our process of dealing with upgrades has become better after every time.

How is this team innovating with OpenStack?

We innovate with OpenStack on two main focus areas:

One of them is figuring out how we can interconnect all our OpenStack data centers over a global, private network and all the benefits that comes from doing so—one of which is being able to provide our customers with a direct, private access to our cloud services.

The other focus area has to do with our focus on helping regulated companies, mainly in the financial and healthcare industries, with their digital transformation and cloud adoption. By building completely separated cloud services compliant with regulations such as ISO 9001, 27001, 27015, 27018, Basel, Solvency and HIPA, we allow for these industries to go cloud with a pay-as-you-go model and be truly agile.

How many Certified OpenStack Administrators (COAs) are on your team?

There are currently three COAs at City Network.

Find out more about the Boston Superuser Awards nominees here, and cast your vote by Tuesday, April 4 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Voting is limited to one ballot per person.

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