Driving Cloud Innovation with OpenStack-Powered Infrastructure

This post originally ran on the Comcast Voices blog. Warren is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Cloud. He enjoys working on large-scale projects. He previously worked on the Xfinity On Demand infrastructure, and has moved onto the Comcast Cloud (OpenStack) team, where he is focused on tackling the storage strategy. You should follow him on Twitter.

This week, my colleagues and I are in Atlanta with thousands of developers, users and administrators of private and public clouds for the OpenStack Summit. We’re here because we share in the belief that an open development model is critical to building cloud infrastructures that are elegant, incredibly scalable and feature rich.

Cloud computing has become strategic to our business. It helps us be more responsive to our customers’ needs, develop our next generation products and services faster, and provides a scalable infrastructure to deliver those services to our customers. The mutual exchange of ideas and experiences in the OpenStack user community has proven an invaluable resource to ensure we build our cloud infrastructure to meet a growing list of business goals.

At the spring 2013 OpenStack Summit in Portland, OR, Mark Muehl demonstrated the X1 cloud-based service running on OpenStack.

A year later, our commitment to OpenStack is stronger than ever as we’ve increased our OpenStack-powered infrastructure more than 5 times and our development teams continue to develop and deploy new products to run on OpenStack.

We also we believe that open source software is a two-way street.

Comcast is helping lead the development of IPv6 support in OpenStack including this session at the Atlanta Summit, submitting blueprints, filing bug reports, reviewing code, and improving documentation. We are in the top 20 of more than 1,200 contributors to the ninth release of OpenStack®, code-named Icehouse™. Participation in the OpenStack community helps us build a quality open source product, not just for our own use, but for everyone.