Sydney Superuser Award Nominee: Memset Hosting - OpenStack Public Cloud Team

Voting is now closed. Stay tuned to find out who wins!

It’s time for the community to determine the winner of the Superuser Award to be presented at the OpenStack Sydney Summit. Based on the community voting, the Superuser Editorial Advisory Board will review the nominees and determine the finalists and overall winner.

Now, it’s your turn.

Memset Hosting is among the seven nominees for the Superuser Awards. Review the nomination criteria below, check out the other nominees and rate the nominees before the deadline Wednesday, September 20 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time Zone.

Please specify the team and organization for nomination.

Ross Martyn
George Stamoulis
Simon Weald
Stewart Perrygrove
Nick Craig-Wood

Memset Hosting has been focused on open source since our inception in 2002. Given the open nature of OpenStack, Memset naturally became heavily interested early in OpenStack’s history.

We had a clear focus from day one; deploy a highly secure, highly available public cloud platform, that meets the strict requirements of the UK Government, then offer that same rock solid level of security to the remainder of our customer base.

How has OpenStack transformed the organization’s business?

OpenStack Swift has been part of Memset’s infrastructure since the Essex release. It forms the core of our multi-award winning distributed cloud storage platform, Memstore, serving ~6.7 million requests a day.

Memset has since developed a fully self-service OpenStack IaaS platform, offering our customers highly performant and tightly-secured public cloud, perfect for UK public and private sector needs.

OpenStack’s rapid development and fantastic community support enables us to implement new features, performance improvements and security updates quicker than ever before, and, excitingly, is increasingly working its way into other parts of our business, most recently being used to breathe new life into our older proprietary Xen- based Cloud VPS platform.

How has the organization participated in or contributed to the OpenStack community?

Alongside our presence in the IRC community, Memset regularly attends a variety of OpenStack events around the globe, including Summits, working groups and operators meetups. We also visit other open source events including Ceph, Kubernetes meet-ups and Gophercon. We are a regular sponsor of events including the London OpenStack Meetup and the upcoming OpenStack Days London conference.

As well as the social aspect of the community, Memset’s team strives to feedback bugs, patches and reviews to the community wherever possible, with a string of contributions to OpenStack since early 2012 to multiple projects.

Memset recently became a corporate sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation, offering our highly secure public IaaS and award winning Cloud Storage (Memstore) from the OpenStack Marketplace.

What open source technologies does the organization use in its IT environment?

Open source is built into the very core of Memset. We extensively utilize an open-source approach wherever possible. This is evident in every layer of our business, from the Ubuntu powered Operations and Development team, through to the heavy Python development and Django management backend that powers Memset’s business critical systems. We strive to build and maintain great public services, using brilliant people, community driven software and commodity hardware.

Memset’s co-owner and technical director Nick Craig-Wood has been able to personally rock the open source object storage community with his pet project rclone – (an rsync tool for cloud storage), and the widely used Go Swift Library, providing an easy way for new Go projects to interact with Swift environments.

Whilst not an exhaustive list, most commonly used technologies at Memset include: OpenStack, Puppet, Ansible, Terraform, Jenkins, Gerrit, Git, SVN, Python, Django, Packer, Docker, HaProxy, Nginx and much more…

What is the scale of the OpenStack deployment?

Memset operates multiple geographically diverse Swift platforms in production, each with varying capacity totaling around .75PB. Alongside this, our OpenStack IaaS deployment has approximately 2TB of production compute available over two geographically diverse regions advertising 300TB of raw Ceph storage through Cinder. We integrate NVME, SSD and HDD storage, all built on latest generation Dell equipment.

Memset operates at two sites in the UK, including its privately owned data center located in Dunsfold. Memset strives to operate in an environmentally friendly manner, regularly winning awards for doing so, aided by our utilization of a large local solar farm to offset a portion of our high power requirements.

What kind of operational challenges have you overcome during your experience with OpenStack?

OpenStack has been fairly easy to integrate into our mature business, mostly due to the great documentation, administration and security guides. Whilst times can become stressful during upgrades and patching cycles, and especially when dealing with customers in production, OpenStack gives us easy access to intelligent management capabilities that allow us to maintain customer uptime and in turn, their satisfaction.

OpenStack’s APIs can give us the ability to dynamically schedule migrations of workloads in order to attempt zero downtime patching, software and hardware upgrades. We strive to minimize this even further for the future, especially as recent OpenStack releases have focused so heavily on improving these processes.

How is this team innovating with OpenStack?

Memset’s OS team focus is currently moving their production environments towards a container based control plane. This will allow us to be able to keep pace with the fast OpenStack release cycle easier than ever before.

Utilizing what we have learned, we aim to be able to stay closer to trunk, and plan to offer Magnum and Octavia as self-service offerings to our loyal customers very soon.

How many Certified OpenStack Administrators (COAs) are on your team?

At Memset we have more than half a dozen Mirantis certified OpenStack Administrators and currently have two engineers studying for the COA exam.