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Walmart, Comcast, Bloomberg headline at OpenStack Days East

Enterprise use cases featured for sold-out crowd in New York City.

October 13, 2016
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The first OpenStack Days East event welcomed more than 500 attendees at the PlayStation Theater in New York City with the theme of “OpenStack in the Enterprise.”

An impressive succession of user stories including Walmart, Bloomberg, Comcast, EBSCO and PayPal took the stage with additional tracks featuring Time Warner Cable’s session about using Mesos/Marathon with OpenStack, as well as networking and network functions virtualization (NFV) featuring Verizon Wireless.

Donna Scott of Gartner set the context for the event talking about CEO and CIO priorities around digital business, including flexible and on-demand infrastructure critical to enabling those capabilities. OpenStack at the core of digital business transformation.

Andrew Mitry and Kire Filipovski of Walmart, the largest private employer in the world with more than 2 million workers, talked about their focus on people and providing the best infrastructure and platforms to support their employees.

Their OpenStack private cloud has grown to 170,000 cores across more than 30 regions and provides the bulk of their programmatic infrastructure. But OpenStack is just one layer, and Filipovski explained how the stack is changing all the way up through the platform through the applications. Specifically, Walmart open sourced its OneOps platform almost a year ago, and demoed the platform’s capabilities for designing, deploying and operating applications. They are interested in working with the community to consider moving the OneOps project into the OpenStack big tent. Finally, the team emphasized culture, because technology is just one piece of the puzzle, and the cultural change to agile methodologies and DevOps is much bigger.

Jonathan Chiang, who previously spoke at the OpenStack Summit Vancouver in his role at NASA’s JPL Laboratory, is now chief architect for the cloud at Comcast. He shared Comcast’s progress with OpenStack which is now in 34 datacenters. Still on Icehouse but soon upgrading directly to Mitaka, Comcast has also made a huge commitment to the community contributing 73,000 lines of code and increasing its contributions by 50 percent in the last 18 months. He talked about Mark Muehl’s vision for multi-tenant platform supporting all of their critical services, including X1, residential email, container services with Kubernetes and big data with Hadoop. He also outlined challenges they are facing, including operational complexity and network performance. Chiang made a rallying cry to other large-scale operators to define standard and repeatable reference architectures and **learn to embrace a bit of chaos in the meantime.**

Jacob Rosenberg, head of infrastructure engineering at Bloomberg shared his team’s decision to build its own private cloud. The established community and control over technology choices were leading factors in selecting OpenStack, but when it came to selecting a cloud model, Bloomberg implemented its own private cloud. This enabled Rosenberg’s team members to move at their own pace and deploy things when they’re ready.

The Bloomberg Clustered Private Cloud (BCPC) has been in production for several years, with its first commit in 2013 in the OpenStack Folsom cycle. It’s available on GitHub and receives many commits from people outside Bloomberg. Rosenberg says that putting a big effort on physical to virtual migration is next for his team, as Bloomberg opens a new data center site.

Among the enterprise use cases, Russell Bryant asked the audience to always remember to think upstream first, emphasizing that this way of working is critical to the goal of interoperability. There is a lot more to the development community than just adding features, but if you want to know where to get involved, it’s helping with code reviews, bug triage and fixing.

You can check out slides and videos from the event’s presentations or hear more  takeaways from the community in this Superuser TV segment:

https://youtu.be/15rvnWYBJc8

https://www.flickr.com/photos/johngordy/5866413523/ // CC BY

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