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It’s time for the community to help determine the winner of the Open Infrastructure Summit Denver Superuser Awards, sponsored by Zenko. The Superuser Editorial Advisory Board will review the nominees and determine the finalists and overall winner after the community has had a chance to review and rate nominees.
Now, it’s your turn.
VEXXHOST is one of four nominees for the Superuser Awards. Review the nomination criteria below, check out the other nominees and rate the nominees before the deadline April at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.
Rate them here!
Who is the nominee?
VEXXHOST is a leading Canadian public, private and hybrid cloud provider with an infrastructure powered by 100 percent vanilla OpenStack. Since the migration to an OpenStack infrastructure in 2011, VEXXHOST has been offering infrastructure-as-a-service without any vendor lock-in or proprietary technology. The team, lead by CEO Mohammed Naser, delivers a high level of expertise to help users optimize cloud infrastructure so they can focus on their core competencies.
How has open infrastructure transformed your business?
OpenStack allows our company to speed up the delivery of new services to customers by accelerating our ability to innovate. The team can focus resources to deliver quality services without dealing with infrastructure issues which are solved by OpenStack. Every release of OpenStack has offered new features that were utilized to deliver higher performance.
How has your company participated in or contributed to an open source project?
VEXXHOST has been contributing to the OpenStack community since its second release in 2011. The company also had a presence in the community by regularly attending OpenStack Summits and participating in the interop challenge during the Boston summit in 2017. The team has also hosted community events, including OpenStack Canada Day and help organize the Montreal OpenStack meetup. Our co-founder Mohammed Naser, the project team lead (PTL) for Puppet OpenStack, has given talks at Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto OpenStack meetups.
We also play a part in the community by actively contributing upstream code and sharing feedback with PTLs and developers. When we encounter bugs, we report them, diagnose them and work with the community to get a full fix in. We’re active on the mailing list and provide feedback and fixes.
What open source technologies does your company use in its open infrastructure environment?
We run exclusively OpenStack services across our entire infrastructure. Our offering is fully open source without any proprietary licensed technology. Among many others, in our IT environment we use Nova with KVM with Libvirt, Ceph centralized storage, Pacemaker for high availability, MySQL Galera for database and Puppet for config management.
What is the scale of your open infrastructure environment?
As a public cloud provider, we can’t disclose metrics regarding the scale of users’ consumption. Our public cloud can handle several production-grade enterprise-scale workloads with private and hybrid cloud solutions delivering the same level of stability and robustness as our public cloud. Both their infrastructure and users’ production workloads are powered by OpenStack. OpenStack’s compute, network and storage are the backbone that power all our managed solutions.
What kind of operational challenges has your company overcome during their experience with open infrastructure?
Initially, we faced some challenges in terms of rolling upgrades as they were difficult though they’ve become much easier with new releases. After upgrading their infrastructure to Pike, we found a bug in the code which we reported. The developers at OpenStack were very responsive and happy to cooperate — as they always are — to help fix the bug. The bug was fixed in less than 24 hours in trunk and less than 48 hours in stable branches.
How is your company innovating with open infrastructure?
As a public and private cloud provider, we’re heavily invested in improving and extending their list of managed services. Using OpenStack has increased innovation in our managed services. In August 2017, we launched Kubernetes services using Magnum on the Pike release. We’ve worked with the Magnum project team to ensure delivery of the best possible Kubernetes and OpenStack experience. VEXXHOST is currently one of the few cloud providers to offer Magnum. OpenStack has also facilitated the delivery of big data solutions with the help of Sahara integration. We were also able to speed up the deployment of clusters with the help of transient clusters that provide huge cost savings.
Each community member can rate the nominees once by April 2 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.
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