News

Tokyo Superuser Awards Finalist: FICO

OpenStack has been a paradigm shift for FICO’s developers and operations, empowering them with direct access to provision and destroy instances.

October 6, 2015
image

It’s time for the community to determine the winner of the Superuser Award to be presented at the OpenStack Tokyo Summit. Based on the nominations received, the Superuser Editorial Advisory Board conducted the first round of judging and narrowed the pool to four finalists.

Now, it’s your turn.

FICO is among the four finalists for the Superuser Award. Review the nomination criteria below, check out the other nominees and vote before the deadline Monday, October 12th at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time Zone.

What kinds of applications are you building or running on FICO’s OpenStack cloud?

At FICO we are running:

  • OpenShift for Containers, the software that runs the service allowing developers to use Git to deploy web applications in different languages on the platform. OpenShift also supports binary programs that are web applications, as long as they can run on Linux. This allows the use of arbitrary languages and frameworks. OpenShift takes care of maintaining the services underlying the application and auto scaling the application as needed.
  • Graylog, a fully integrated open source log management platform for collecting, indexing, and analyzing both structured and unstructured data from almost any source.
  • Zenoss, an open-source application, server, and network management platform based on the Zope application serve providing a web interface that allows system administrators to monitor availability,inventory/configuration, performance, and events.
  • Cisco UCS Central Software, which extends the functions and concepts of Cisco UCS Manager. It dramatically simplifies operations, automates and simplifies.

How has OpenStack transformed your business?

We have increased agility, which has lowered time to market for new new applications and application enhancements. Costs have been lowered for internal and customer facing cloud environments.

Overall, it has been a paradigm shift for developers and operations to have direct access to provision and destroy instances, including applications on demand or in an automated fashion.

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

One of the benefits we see in an open development model is leveraging the intellectual mindset of people within and outside of FICO, across the world, who have a passion for open source projects. We take advantage of an aggressive roadmap the community is contributing, while we put our code back in for others to consider and leverage if they want. We contribute at the Summit design sessions wherever we can, and integrate into sessions as much as possible. We also write code that is tangential to the OpenStack projects, such as tools for automated image conversion, and self-management. We also contribute to documentation and StackForge whenever possible.

What is the scale of your OpenStack deployment?

Our OpenStack hosted applications are currently customer facing and running in production, including a number of Fortune 500 companies. Unfortunately, we are not at liberty to discuss the user specifics due to non-disclosure agreements, but we have multiple thousands of containers and instances running in these environments.

We are excited to share our story about why we chose OpenStack, how we are helping to shape the future of it and explaining how FICO and others can benefit from the project.

Find out more about the Tokyo Superuser Awards finalists here and cast your vote. Voting is limited to one ballot per person, and closes on Monday, October 12th at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time Zone.

Cover Photo by GotCredit // CC BY NC

Superuser
Latest posts by Superuser (see all)