2022 Superuser Awards Nominee: OVHcloud

OVHcloud’s team:

Arnaud Morin: SRE / DevOps
Damien Rannou: Principal Engineer
Xavier Nicolle: SRE Director
Jean-Daniel Bonnetot : Technical Product Marketing Manager Jacques Murez: Product Manager Public Cloud
Pierre Ourdouillé: Data Group Lead
Laurent Berger: Public Cloud Group Lead
Gilles Closset: Strategic Technology Alliances Director

With large scale and a multi-tenant environment came challenges: first in 2012 with storage. We were able to finely tune OpenStack Swift to embrace our specific industrialization processes. The resulting offer called hubiC quickly reached 1 million customers.

For compute resources, the Network layer, the East-West traffic, the Regions, and so on. we applied the same recipe of fine tuning and redesigning pieces of the stack. This allowed us to innovate and grow faster, now across 4 continents.

Moreover, the open infrastructure deeply echoed with one of the main OVHcloud core value: Freedom. Freedom for our customers to move freely out of our platform with guaranteed interoperability, Freedom from an open standard that can guarantee technological sovereignty.

We have been involved in many community events such as Meetups since 2014 in France, Canada & Poland. We also attended the OpenStack Summits since 2015 and provided hosting resources to support its organization. We also participated to the organization of OpenStack Days, were involved in the SIG group “Large scale” and had people as speakers in several episodes of OpenInfra Live. This year again a group of 27 people is participating to the 2022 OpenInfra Summit.

We have been actively engaged in code contribution with several dozens of reviews, commits and bugfixes. OVHcloud is also one of the cloud providers for the OpenStack CI/CD since 2015.

We released a software in Open Source named OS Archiver to manage data retention in the SQL databases behind OpenStack.

We are deploying most of the OpenStack core components, such as: Nova, Cinder, Glance, Neutron, Swift, Keystone and Horizon. We also deploy other components like Octavia, Barbican, Mistral, Heat, Tempest, Rally and Manila.

We deploy our infrastructures using softwares, like Puppet, Ansible and Terraform.

We are also moving towards an intent-driven architecture using Kubernetes to manage OpenStack services orchestration.

Our monitoring/alerting is based on Prometheus. Our storage stack is based on Ceph.

Our Data stack for customers is based on open-source technologies: Apache Hadoop, MySQL, MariaDB, ProtgreSQL, Kafka, Redis, OpenSearch, MongoDB, Apache Spark, Jupyter, Tensorflow.

We have now over 400.000 instances running with 900.000 cores.

Regarding storage and physical space we currently have on Ceph 60PB and in Swift 300PB.

In terms of API calls, we process 6 million requests every hour.

We developed a custom Neutron driver to manage public and private networks. These kinds of custom developments were a real asset but we had to be careful on the impacts of an OpenStack environment update. We successfully upgraded from Juno to Newton to Stein.

As we use a lot live migration to perform hypervisors rollout upgrades, we fixed many of the live-migration issues in the early days. But now thanks to the help of the community this feature became really robust and we are happy to rely on the vanilla version.

Every 6 month the whole infrastructure of 400.000 instances is live migrated to ensure its never-ending lifecycle.

A worldwide Keystone requires low latency and HA. We used Galera clusters, pools of MariaDB servers in every DC, and OVHcloud IPLB service and BGP.

Moving from an IaaS focus to a PaaS focus, we aim to enrich its OpenStack platform with AI Tools and GPU-powered instances. As of today, AI Tools include AI Notebooks, AI Training, and AI Apps, and let you store, explore and preprocess, train and finally deploy and serve your AI App to perform predictive analysis.

In addition, we just released a set of DBaaS offers. OVHcloud Teams up with partners to offer managed solutions and enlarge its ecosystem to bring added value service on top of its cloud infrastructure.

With a strong foundation based on the Openinfrastructure ecosystem, OVHcloud aims to federate all players that believe in an open system where anyone stays in control of their data – to manage in an open, trustful, reversible, and transparent way. That’s how we build freedom.