Game changer: inside Adobe’s new Marketing Cloud architecture

The Adobe Marketing Cloud powers software-as-a-service marketing for outfits such as the Los Angeles Kings, eBags and Verizon Wireless. When the IT infrastructure team in Adobe’s Digital Marketing group realized it was time for an evolutionary revamp, it turned to OpenStack and VMware to up its game.

Adobe Digital Marketing was already offering web experience management, analytics, social marketing, media optimization, testing and targeting, and campaign management for hundreds of organizations around the world employing a full compute VMware virtualization across many datacenters.

But with an eye on the long game, the IT team realized it was time to leverage its VMware infrastructure in a new way by shifting toward fully-fledged private cloud infrastructure. This new private cloud stack was developed from the ground up taking into account standardization, automation and self-service as well as the ability to scale on network, compute and storage independently from each other.

This is the first in series of OpenStack in-depth architecture reports. You can download a PDF Adobe Digital Marketing’s full reference architecture here.

VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) offered a full, standard OpenStack distribution. The best combination of capabilities, maturity, roadmap, and VMware integration enabled Adobe Digital Marketing efficient infrastructure modernization while building on the strengths of their existing environment. Amr Abdelrazik over at the VMware Blog recently announced the general availability of VMware Integrated OpenStack 1.0.

“We wanted a layer that includes community drive. If we wanted to contribute to some of the projects, we can. With OpenStack’s maturity, its roadmap, as well as where it’s going — we felt most comfortable with that,” says Adobe Digital Marketing cloud architect Frans Van Rooyen.

Once Adobe realized it could use VMware Integrated OpenStack to accelerate change, the team kickstarted its new approach by building a small proof-of-concept environment with 14 servers across four clusters, each with internal stage.

The company found OpenStack mature and robust, ready to develop and deploy its customer-facing environment. While issues such as upgrade paths were concerns, VIO’s roadmap and ease of upgrade mitigated potential problems. This new approach has empowered several key benefits for Adobe, including improved agility, flexibility, and performance. The company sees the OpenStack infrastructure facilitating hybrid cloud capabilities in the long haul.

Adobe’s Timothy Gelter and Van Rooyen will be leading a session on the "union of technologies" Adobe used to build its new private cloud stack and the implications for similar large-scale deployments at the 2015 Vancouver OpenStack Summit.

You can download Adobe Digital Marketing’s full architecture report here. Read about other options to integrate OpenStack with VMware-based infrastructures, and enterprises using them here.

Cover image by Antonio Martinez // CC BY NC-SA 2.0