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It’s time for the community to help determine the winner of the OpenStack Vancouver Summit Superuser Awards, sponsored by Zenko. 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.
City Network is one of the seven nominees for the Superuser Awards. Review the nomination criteria below, check out the other nominees and rate the nominees before the deadline Tuesday, April 24 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time Zone.
Cast your vote here!
Who are the team members?
City Network’s dev ops, professional services, education and engineering teams: Marcus Murwall, Tobias Rydberg, Magnus Bergman, Tobias Johansson, Alexander Roos, Johan Hedberg, Joakim Olsson, Emil Sundstedt, Mattias Nilsson, Lars Östergaard, Erik Johansson, Joel Svensson, Erik Arenhill, Ioannis Karamperis, Johan Hedberg, Namrata Sitlani, Christoffer Carlberg, Daniel Öhberg, Florian Haas, Adolfo Brandes, Syed Armani, Priscila Prado.
How has open infrastructure transformed your business?
Shifting to 100 percent focus on OpenStack has been key to the global expansion of our organization in general and our cloud offerings in particular. City Network is now a global provider of public, compliant, private and hybrid-cloud solutions based on OpenStack.
With OpenStack and all its features, ease-of-use and popularity as the catalyst we have added value through multiple data centers in Europe, the U.S., Asia and the United Arab Emirates. With a clear strategy and implementation of data protection and regulatory aspects, City Network is leading the way for cloud and OpenStack adoption in the financial services industry.
How has the organization participated in or contributed to an open infrastructure community?
- Our CEO is a member of the OpenStack Foundation Board. His goal is to help the community and the ecosystem to leverage this open platform and drive the transformation for a more open, future-proof IT infrastructure.
- City Network founded and is still organizing OpenStack Days Nordic, 2018 marks our third year. We are also involved in OpenStack Days Israel and India and attend multiple OpenStack Days events across the globe.
- We have participated in every summit for the past six years and contribute to the user groups; public cloud and the security project.
- City Network provides OpenStack training and is working to bridge the OpenStack and Open edX communities through mutual collaboration with the common ambition of providing quality education to anyone with access to a browser.
What open source technologies does the organization use in its IT environment?
We are very pro open source and use it in every case where open source is a viable option. A selection of the Open Source technologies we are currently using: CentOS, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, Nginx, Apache, PHP, Python, Ansible, MySQL, Mariadb, Mongodb and Ceph, Open edX.
What is the scale of the OpenStack deployment?
We run our public OpenStack based cloud in eight regions across three continents. All our data centers are interconnected via private networks. In addition to our public cloud, we provide a pan-European cloud for verticals where regulatory compliance is paramount (e.g. banking and financial services, government, healthcare) addressing all regulatory challenges. Over 2,000 users of our infrastructure-as-a-service solutions run over 10,000 cores in production.
What operational challenges have you overcome during your experience with open infrastructure?
Since we’re running OpenStack as public IaaS there have been a lot of hurdles to overcome as OpenStack is not yet fully adapted for public clouds. We had to build our own APIs in order to get network connectivity over several sites to work and also we had to add features such as volume copy and the ability to move volumes between sites. We have also had our fair share of issues with upgrading to new OpenStack versions, however we do feel as this process have been getting better with each upgrade.
How is this team innovating with open infrastructure?
We innovate with OpenStack on two main focus areas. One is figuring out how we can interconnect all our OpenStack data centers over a global, private network and all the benefits that comes from doing so—including being able to provide customers with a direct, private access to our cloud services.
The other focus area has to do with our focus on helping regulated companies, mainly in the financial and healthcare industries with their digital transformation and cloud adoption. By building completely separated cloud services compliant with regulations such as ISO 9001, 27001, 27015, 27018, Basel, solvency and HIPAA, we allow for these industries to go cloud with a pay-as-you-go model and be truly agile.
How many Certified OpenStack Administrators (COAs) are on your team?
None.
Voting is limited to one ballot per person and closes Tuesday, April 24 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time Zone.
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