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It’s time for the community to help determine the winner of the OpenStack Berlin Summit Superuser Awards, sponsored by Zenko. 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’s research and development, professional services, education and engineering teams are one of five nominees for the Superuser Awards. Review the nomination criteria below, check out the other nominees and rate the nominees before the deadline October 21 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.
Cast your vote here!
Who is the nominee?
The team: Marcus Murwall, Tobias Rydberg, Magnus Bergman, Tobias Johansson, Alexander Roos, Johan Hedberg, Joakim Olsson, Emil Sundstedt, Erik Johansson, Joel Svensson, Ioannis Karamperis, Johan Hedberg, Namrata Sitlani, Christoffer Carlberg, Daniel Öhberg, Florian Haas, Adolfo Brandes, Priscila Prado.
How has open infrastructure transformed your business?
With emphasis on regulatory compliance and data protection, we are a European leader, promoter and enabler of OpenStack-based compliant cloud solutions. These solutions are tailored for regulatory challenged industries such as banks, insurance companies, healthcare and governments. The pace of innovation within these industries has always been dictated by the heavy demand for control, data protection, auditability and other factors specific to the nature of the information they care for. With our OpenStack-based Compliant Cloud solutions, we prove that some of the largest banks, insurance companies and digital identity management companies in the world can increase their pace of innovation while still being regulatory compliant.
How has the organization participated in or contributed to an open infrastructure community?
- Our CEO is a member of the OpenStack Foundation Board
- City Network initiated and is OpenStack Days Nordic three years in a row. We are also involved in OpenStack Days Israel and India and attend multiple OpenStack Days events across the globe.
- We have participated in every summit for the past six years, the PTGs, and contribute to the working groups; public cloud and the security project.
- We provide OpenStack training and strive to bridge the OpenStack and Open edX communities through mutual collaboration with the common ambition of providing quality education to everybody with access to a browser and an internet connection.
- Members of our team have contributed code since 2012, focused on training, documentation, code contribution and bug fixes to various Official projects.
What open-source technologies does the organization use in its IT environment?
We are very pro open source and use it in every case wherever it’s a viable option.
A selection of the open-source technologies we are currently using: CentOS, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, Nginx, Apache, PHP, Python, Ansible, MySQL, Mariadb, Mongodb, Ceph and Open edX.
What’s the scale of the 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. In addition to our public cloud, we provide a pan-European cloud for verticals where regulatory compliance is paramount (e.g. banking and financial services, government, healthcare) addressing all regulatory challenges. Over 2,000 users of our infrastructure-as-a-service solutions run over 25,000 cores in production.
What kind of operational challenges have you overcome during your experience with open infrastructure?
Since we have been running OpenStack as 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 also we had to add features such as volume copy and the ability to move volumes between sites. We have also had our fair share of issues with upgrading to new OpenStack versions, however we do feel as this process have been getting better with each upgrade.
We’re also embarking a huge OSA conversion this fall which we believe will make things much easier moving forwards.
How is this team innovating with open infrastructure?
Our true innovation lies in the fact that we have managed to build a global open-source based cloud solution fit for regulatory challenged enterprises. These are enterprises who haven’t really been able to utilize the true potential of cloud computing until they met us.
An enterprise building their own private cloud because they don’t have a choice is one thing. But unless running a cloud is part of their core business, they are not fully focused on their mission.
A regulatory challenged enterprise who is able to utilize cloud computing on a pay-as-you-go model through a vendor, just like any other organization, is a whole other ball game. That organization can focus 100 percent on their core business and stand a fighting chance in our era of digitization.
How many Certified OpenStack Administrators (COAs) are on your team?
None.
Voting is limited to one ballot per person and closes October 21 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.
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