Turning your challenges to opportunities in Nokia NESC OpenStack

Starting with just a handful of servers 10 year ago, Nokia Enterprise and Services Cloud (NESC) has grown into one of the world’s largest OpenStack private clouds providing 484,000 virtual computing cores, 40PB of storage and a sustained monthly usage in excess of 230 million active core hours in month. NESC is distributed globally across three continents in six Tier three data centers and is used by Nokia for hosting mission critical research and development workloads and customer interfacing business applications. NESC provides standard Infrastructure As A Service components strengthened with ISO27001 certification.

Key to the success of NESC has been constant evolution, empowering our Nokia R&D and applications teams to reliably and rapidly build the virtual environments via self-service and automation. Every day in NESC there are over 200,000 new virtual server instance starts and close to 100,000 API calls per minute during peak hours, a challenge for any cloud.

Fortunately NESC has a great developer team who focus not on telling users what is not possible, but instead on figuring out how. This has driven the team to develop and excel in some key areas like:

Monitoring, logging and metrics analytics: NESC Logstash solution collects around 2 million log lines per minute which is then indexed and enriched in real-time to maximize the value of the data. In addition, NESC continuously collects huge volumes of metrics that are used not only for looking at current status, but also by applying Machine learning, are able to find anomalies, performance degradations and even to make future predictions of outcomes based on trends.

Operation Automation: “The best sysadmin is a lazy one”. They don’t want to fix same things over and over again. Anything that can be automated in NESC is, from upgrades to database clean-ups and other resource leaks.

Master data: The key to successful and reliable automation is the reliability of programmable inventory data. You need to know with certainty on which assets what services are running so you can automate them. NESC tried enterprise commercial auto-discovery tools and other methods for many years, but none of them were reliable enough or able to keep dependencies and context consistent. Today, we have developed and implemented our own auto-discovery solution for inventory and configuration management as single source of truth.

Security: With NESC software development tools & processes and the overall service being ISO 27001 certified, the security journey has been filled with automated controls and dedicated toolsets that are mostly open source based.

Today NESC is stronger and better as a result, a dependable service within Nokia. The ability to embrace challenges forced the team to learn faster and adopt new ideas and services like GeoDNS, tiered storage solutions or NESC’s latest fast growing Kubernetes as service offering. NESC DNA of fast development cycles, fail sooner than later and extensive automation has pushed us this far.

The next chapter for NESC is to offer it as a managed service to Nokia customers worldwide, either as an on-Premises or off-premises solution.