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Vancouver Superuser Awards Finalist: eBay Inc.

Powering 100 percent of PayPal’s 2014 holiday web traffic, the eBay Inc. cloud is continuing to scale, with plans to boost the number of hypervisors by 17 percent.

April 15, 2015
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This year, the OpenStack Foundation has instituted a new community voting process to determine the winner of the Superuser Award that will be presented at the OpenStack Vancouver Summit. Based on nominations received, the Superuser Editorial Advisory Board conducted the first round of judging and narrowed the pool to a group of four finalists.

Now, it’s your turn.

eBay Inc. is among the four finalists for the Superuser Award. Review the nomination criteria below, check out the other nominees, and cast your vote.

Team and organization for nomination:

eBay Inc. cloud engineering team, the engineering and operations team behind eBay Inc. and PayPal’s OpenStack-powered cloud

In what industry is your organization?

Retail / E-commerce

What kinds of applications are you building or running on your OpenStack cloud?

  1. Most of dev/test workloads for eBay Inc. and PayPal developers
  2. 100 percent of PayPal web/mid-tier
  3. Significant (double digit) parts of eBay Inc. web tier
  4. Mesos clusters for continuous integration (CI) and batch workloads (in the works)
  5. Hadoop and NoSQL databases (in the works)

What is the scale of your OpenStack deployment?

  1. Total number of hypervisors: 8,500, of which 4,100 nodes serving PayPal, while the rest are shared between dev/test workloads and eBay Inc marketplaces. These are distributed across several share-nothing availability zones (AZs).
  2. Number of virtual cores: 300,000
  3. Total number of virtual machines: 70,000
  4. Provisioned block storage: over 1.5 PetaBytes
  5. Number of users: several thousand

We have a few more AZs are in the works, and the total number of hypervisors is expected to exceed 10,000 by the end of June 2015.

How has OpenStack provided your organization with a competitive advantage in the market?

  1. Developer agility: we firmly believe that our business agility depends on the agility of dev/test use cases. We relied on OpenStack and OpenStack-powered platforms to execute this strategy. Most of our development teams in eBay Inc and PayPal now use our OpenStack cloud for developing and testing applications.
  2. Innovation: our developers are now able to innovate freely and rapidly knowing that the infrastructure that they need is available when they need it. Infrastructure primitives like virtual machines, block and object storage, DNS and LBaaS are now available to every developer in the company via self-service OpenStack APIs.
  3. Efficiency: our investments in multi-tenancy with OpenStack are helping us reduce capex and opex by consolidating all new infrastructure under cloud. We are able to onboard small- to medium-sized use cases rapidly on shared infrastructure without going through long planning, procurement, design and delivery cycles.
  4. Availability: our AZs and portfolio of OpenStack-based cloud services are helping us implement cloud patterns for availability.
  5. Security: virtualization, standardization of access policies, and automation are helping us simplify security. Purpose-built one-off silos are now getting merged into standardized virtual private clouds built on OpenStack.

How has OpenStack transformed your business?

  1. There would be a riot if the cloud were to disappear today, as most of our developers maximize on-demand access to our OpenStack-based infrastructure and take it for granted.
  2. The business firmly believes that cloud enables agility, efficiency, security and availability for the business. There is strong motivation to run everything on cloud.
  3. With the expansion of our OpenStack footprint, we are reducing complexity by homogenizing the infrastructure
  4. OpenStack services like Load-Balancing-as-a-Service (LBaaS), Neutron and Designate are abstracting proprietary devices thus creating operational efficiency and simplification.
  5. Key metrics for testing and deployment have been reduced from weeks and hours to just minutes in most areas. This is made possible due to OpenStack’s stable APIs.

Describe how your deployment has grown and evolved.

  1. Our OpenStack footprint grew from about 100 nodes in summer of 2012 to more than 8,500 nodes by the end of March 2015.
  2. We are now operating several share-nothing AZs in three geographic regions.
  3. We built a complete stack of software and operational tools to bring repeatability to deploy and apply changes to our AZs. This stack includes OpenStack source from https://github.com/openstack and open source tools like puppet, Foreman, SaltStack, Zabbix, ElasticSearch, LogStash etc, as well as several homegrown tools.
  4. In order to deliver business continuity and to maintain confidence on OpenStack, our teams pulled off critical OpenStack upgrades including Nova-network to Neutron.
  5. We collect more than 1.2 billion metrics daily to monitor and operate our cloud.
  6. 100 percent of our OpenStack-hosted virtual machines run on KVM and OVS.
  7. Almost all dev/test workloads in eBay Inc and PayPal are running on OpenStack.
  8. Further ramp up of production workloads is continuing through 2015.
  9. Our OpenStack cloud processed 100 percent of PayPal payments during the 2014 holiday season.
  10. We are now equipping ourselves to support stateful workloads like NoSQL databases and Hadoop on cloud.

What does the OpenStack community mean to you, and how have you given back?

  1. We are grateful for the vision and contributions made by the community.
  2. Our teams have shared our practices and lessons at every summit since the San Diego summit in 2012. Our team members are presenting eight sessions at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Vancouver.
  3. Our team members have submitted patches and made contributions to Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Trove, LBaaS and Designate.
  4. We hosted the first OpenStack Operators meetup in our San Jose campus last year.
  5. We participate in Design Summits and operator meetups to share our experiences in setting up, upgrading and operating OpenStack at scale.
  6. eBay Inc. has been a representative in the User Committee.

If you think eBay Inc should be crowned the next Superuser Award recipient, cast your vote here!

You can check out more information on each of the Vancouver Superuser Awards finalists here. Voting is limited to one ballot per person, and closes on Monday, May 4th at 11:59 PM Central Time Zone.

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