Who do you think should win the 2021 Superuser Awards?
It’s time for you to help determine the winner of the 2021 Superuser Awards! The annual Superuser Awards is to recognize organizations that have used open infrastructure to improve their business while contributing back to the community.
This year, the Superuser Awards winner will be announced at the OpenInfra Live: Keynotes, November 17 – 18th! This will be the best opportunity for the global community to get together this year to hear about all things OpenInfra. Registration is free and is now live, so get your virtual ticket today and join us for Keynotes!
InMotion Hosting is one of 11 nominees for the Superuser Awards. Check out why its team getting nominated and support them on Twitter!
Who is the nominee?
InMotion Hosting
How has open infrastructure transformed the organization’s business?
Open Infrastructure has transformed our business by automating our infrastructure and producing new revenue streams through our Flex Metal Cloud product. Rapid prototyping and research using OpenStack, enabled InMotion Hosting to provision over 500 clouds on top of our hardware pool since January 2021. This also transformed the team’s engineering capabilities and knowledge by introducing advanced technologies such as Kubernetes and GPUs.
How has the organization participated in or contributed to an open source project?
Early 2021 we launched our On-Demand Private Cloud product and collaborated with the OIF teams to make open-source infrastructure easily accessible to smaller businesses and teams. We’ve launched various campaigns with OIF and various partners discussing the growth of open source infrastructure and the power of OpenStack. OIF launched a case study on InMotion Hosting to inform other foundation members to take advantage of marketing opportunities based on our successful efforts. We’ve been OpenStack Evangelists promoting OpenStack adoption by developing technical troubleshooting documentation. Additionally, we report bugs, share use cases, and regularly attend and sponsor Summits. We’ve donated infrastructure to the Zuul project and collaborated on continuous product/testing improvements.
What open source technologies does the organization use in its open infrastructure environment?
OpenStack: Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Horizon, Placement, Glance, Octavia, Magnum, Heat, Swift, Identity, Manila, Zun, Ironic, Designate; Ceph; Ceph-Ansible; Kolla; Kolla-Ansible; Ansible; Python; Docker; Harbor.io; GitLab; CentOS; MariaDB
What is the scale of your open infrastructure environment?
Our platform focuses on providing small, renewable OpenStack private clouds on-demand to users who like OpenStack but cannot deploy OpenStack on their own. Since January 2021, we have provisioned and recycled over 500 OpenStack private clouds.
What kind of operational challenges have you overcome during your experience with open infrastructure?
The biggest challenge our team overcame was fully automating the deployment of bare metal hardware, networking, Ceph, and OpenStack in a testable, reproducible fashion. Unlike many other OpenStack providers who offer “virtual private clouds” that still share a single OpenStack control plane, every OpenStack private cloud we create has its own dedicated control plane isolated from every other cloud on our platform. Offering a truly private experience was much more complex technically than simply provisioning “virtual private clouds’ for users. We as a team feel ensuring complete privacy and security is more important than ever today.
How is this team innovating with open infrastructure?
We are making OpenStack accessible to an audience for whom OpenStack was historically too expensive, too difficult, or too time-consuming to run in a private cloud configuration. We have lowered the cost of entry for OpenStack private clouds and have made OpenStack a viable alternative to big public clouds for smaller teams, businesses, and enterprises without large infrastructure budgets and systems administration teams. Our innovative automated deployment system also makes OpenStack more available than ever before for trial, experimentation, and research. Our customers and our team can rapidly create prototypes and custom configurations for OpenStack in a safe, production-like environment without having to worry about impacting their real production OpenStack cloud.
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 the nominees. Stay tuned!
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