How to Introduce Your Organization to OpenStack
There is no ideal way to implement OpenStack in your company, but there are general principles that can guide you towards a successful implementation.
One of the advantages of open source software, such as OpenStack, is the ability to download it, try it out and get a practical idea of it without long interaction with vendors of vendor companies or without the need for long internal approvals of a pilot project between your company and company vendor.
But what happens when the time comes to do something more than just try a project? How will you prepare a deployed system from source to production? How can you overcome organizational barriers to introducing new and transforming technologies? Where to begin? What will you do next?
Of course, much can be learned from the experience of those who have already deployed OpenStack. To better understand the patterns of adopting OpenStack, I talked with several teams that successfully introduced this system to their companies.
If the need is strong enough, then introducing a flexible cloud infrastructure can be almost as simple as “building it and they will come”. In many ways, this is the experience that Alejandro Comisario, Maximiliano Venesio, and Leandro Reox got from their company MercadoLibre, the largest e-commerce company in Latin America and the eighth largest in the world.
In 2011, when the company's development department began the path of decomposing its then-monolithic system into a platform consisting of loosely coupled services connected via APIs, the infrastructure team met with a sharp increase in the number of requests to their small team that needed to be fulfilled.
“The shift happened very quickly,” says Alejandro Comisario, technical director of the MercadoLibre cloud services. - We literally suddenly realized that we could not continue to work in such a rhythm without the help of any system.
Alejandro Comisario, Maximiliano Venesio and Leandro Reox, the entire MercadoLibre team at the time, began looking for technologies that would enable them to eliminate the manual steps involved in providing infrastructure to their developers.
The team set itself more complex tasks, formulating goals not only for short-term tasks, but also for the goals of the entire company: reducing the time of providing users with virtual machines ready for a productive environment from 2 hours to 10 seconds and eliminating human intervention from this process.
When they found OpenStack, it became clear that this was exactly what they were looking for. The fast-growing culture of MercadoLibre allowed the team to move quickly in creating the OpenStack environment, despite the relative immaturity of the project at that time.
“It has become clear that the OpenStack approach — researching, diving into code, and testing functionality and scaling is the same as the MercadoLiber approach,” says Leandro Reox. - We were able to immediately immerse ourselves in the project, determine the set of tests for our installation of OpenStack and begin testing.
Their initial testing on the second OpenStack release identified several issues that prevented them from becoming productive, however, the transition from Bexar to Cactus just happened at the right time. Further testing of the Cactus release made sure that the cloud was ready for commercial use.
The launch of commercial operation and understanding by developers of the possibility of obtaining infrastructure as quickly as developers are able to consume it, determined the success of the implementation.
“The whole company longed for a similar system and the functionality it provides,” says Maximiliano Venesio, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at MercadoLibre.
However, the team was careful in managing developers' expectations. They needed to make sure that the developers understood that existing applications could not work on the new private cloud without changes.
“We had to make sure our developers were ready to write stateless applications for the cloud,” said Alejandro Comisario. - It was a huge cultural shift for them. In some cases, we had to teach developers that storing their data in an instance is not enough. Developers needed to adjust their thinking.
The team was attentive to the training of developers and recommended them the best practices for creating cloud-ready applications. They sent emails, conducted non-formal learning dinners and formal trainings, and provided proper cloud documentation. The result of their efforts is this: MercadoLibre developers are now as comfortable developing cloud applications as they were developing traditional applications for the company's virtualized environments.
The automation that they were able to achieve with a private cloud paid off, allowing MercadoLibre to dramatically scale up its infrastructure. What started as an infrastructure team of three people supporting 250 developers, 100 servers and 1000 virtual machines grew into a team of 10 people supporting more than 500 developers, 2000 servers and 12,000 VMs.
For the team at Workday, a SaaS company, the decision to accept OpenStack was not so much operational as strategic.
Workday’s path to introducing a private cloud began in 2013, when company executives agreed to invest in a broad software-defined data center (SDDC) initiative. The hope for this initiative was to achieve greater automation, innovate and increase the efficiency of data centers.
Workday created its vision of a private cloud between the company's infrastructure, engineering and operations teams, and an agreement was reached to launch a research initiative. Workday hired Carmine Remi as director of cloud solutions to lead the change.
Rimi's first task at Workday was to expand the original business case to a large part of the company.
The cornerstone of the business case was increasing flexibility with SDDC. This increased flexibility would help the company fulfill its wishes for continuous software deployment with zero downtime. The SDDC API was designed to enable Workday application and platform development teams to innovate in a previously inaccessible way.
The effectiveness of the equipment was also taken into account in the business case. Workday sets ambitious goals to increase the utilization of existing equipment and data center resources.
“You can start the plan and learn how to manage a new cloud with a small workload, akin to traditional R&D, which allows you to experiment in safe conditions,” Rimi suggested.
With a solid business case, Rimi rated several well-known private cloud platforms, including OpenStack, for a wide range of evaluation criteria, which included the openness of each platform, ease of use, flexibility, reliability, resilience, availability of support and community, as well as potential. Based on the results of their assessment, Rimi and his team selected OpenStack and set about creating a private cloud ready for commercial use.
With the successful launch of its first viable OpenStack cloud, Workday continues to push for a broader rollout of the new SDDC. To achieve this, Rimi uses a multi-stakeholder approach that focuses on:
Electronics retail chain BestBuy has annual revenue of $ 43 billion and 140,000 employees, being the largest of the companies listed in the article. And therefore, while the processes used by the bestbuy.com infrastructure team in preparing the private cloud based on OpenStack are not unique, the flexibility with which they applied these processes is impressive.
To implement their first OpenStack cloud at BestBuy, Steve Eastham, Web Solutions Director and Joel Crabb, Chief Architect, had to rely on creativity to overcome the many barriers that stood in their way.
The BestBuy OpenStack initiative grew in early 2011 from trying to understand the various business processes associated with the release processes of the bestbuy.com e-commerce site. These efforts have revealed significant inefficiencies in quality assurance processes. The quality control process brought significant costs for every major release of the site, which took place two to four times a year. A significant part of these costs was associated with manually setting up the environment, reconciling discrepancies, and resolving resource availability issues.
To address these issues, bestbuy.com launched the “On-Demand Quality Control” initiative, led by Steve Eastham and Joel Crabb, to identify and resolve bottlenecks in the bestbuy.com quality control process. Among the main recommendations of this project were the automation of quality control processes and the provision of self-service tools to user groups.
Although Steve Eastham and Joel Crabb were able to use the prospect of very significant quality control costs to justify investing in a private cloud, they quickly ran into a problem: although approval for the project was received, there was no funding for the project. There was no budget for the purchase of equipment for the project.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and the team took a new approach to financing the cloud: they changed the budget for two developers with another team that had a budget for equipment.
On the budget they intended to buy the equipment necessary for the project. Having contacted HP, their equipment supplier at the time, they set about optimizing the offer. Thanks to thorough negotiations and an acceptable reduction in equipment requirements, they were able to cut equipment costs by almost half.
In the same vein, Steve Eastham and Joel Crabb made a deal with the network team of the company, taking advantage of the existing capacity of the existing core, saving the typical costs associated with the purchase of new network equipment.
“We stood on rather thin ice,” said Steve Eastham. - This was not a common practice at BestBuy either at that time or now. We acted below the radar level. We could get a reprimand, but we managed to avoid it.
Overcoming financial difficulties was only the first of many obstacles. At that time, there was practically no opportunity to find OpenStack experts for the project. Thus, they had to create a team from scratch by connecting in a team of traditional Java developers and system administrators.
“We just put them in one room and said,“ Find out how to work with this system, ”says Joel Crabb. - One of the Java developers told us: “This is crazy, you cannot do it. I don’t know what you are talking about. ”
Their success has provided a good opportunity to ask for additional resources for their private cloud initiative. And this time they had support at the top management level of the company.
Steve Eastham and Joel Crabb received the funding needed to hire additional staff and five new equipment racks. The first cloud in this wave of projects was the OpenStack environment, which launched the Hadoop cluster for analytics. And it is already in commercial operation.
The stories of MercadoLibre, Workday and Best Buy have a number of principles that can guide you along the path of successful implementation of OpenStack: be open to the needs of developers, business and other potential users; work within the framework of the established processes of your company; cooperation with other organizations; and be prepared to act outside the rules when necessary. These are all valuable soft-skills that are good to have with the OpenStack cloud.
One of the advantages of open source software, such as OpenStack, is the ability to download it, try it out and get a practical idea of it without long interaction with vendors of vendor companies or without the need for long internal approvals of a pilot project between your company and company vendor.
But what happens when the time comes to do something more than just try a project? How will you prepare a deployed system from source to production? How can you overcome organizational barriers to introducing new and transforming technologies? Where to begin? What will you do next?
Of course, much can be learned from the experience of those who have already deployed OpenStack. To better understand the patterns of adopting OpenStack, I talked with several teams that successfully introduced this system to their companies.
MercadoLibre: the dictates of necessity and running faster than fallow deer
If the need is strong enough, then introducing a flexible cloud infrastructure can be almost as simple as “building it and they will come”. In many ways, this is the experience that Alejandro Comisario, Maximiliano Venesio, and Leandro Reox got from their company MercadoLibre, the largest e-commerce company in Latin America and the eighth largest in the world.
In 2011, when the company's development department began the path of decomposing its then-monolithic system into a platform consisting of loosely coupled services connected via APIs, the infrastructure team met with a sharp increase in the number of requests to their small team that needed to be fulfilled.
“The shift happened very quickly,” says Alejandro Comisario, technical director of the MercadoLibre cloud services. - We literally suddenly realized that we could not continue to work in such a rhythm without the help of any system.
Alejandro Comisario, Maximiliano Venesio and Leandro Reox, the entire MercadoLibre team at the time, began looking for technologies that would enable them to eliminate the manual steps involved in providing infrastructure to their developers.
The team set itself more complex tasks, formulating goals not only for short-term tasks, but also for the goals of the entire company: reducing the time of providing users with virtual machines ready for a productive environment from 2 hours to 10 seconds and eliminating human intervention from this process.
When they found OpenStack, it became clear that this was exactly what they were looking for. The fast-growing culture of MercadoLibre allowed the team to move quickly in creating the OpenStack environment, despite the relative immaturity of the project at that time.
“It has become clear that the OpenStack approach — researching, diving into code, and testing functionality and scaling is the same as the MercadoLiber approach,” says Leandro Reox. - We were able to immediately immerse ourselves in the project, determine the set of tests for our installation of OpenStack and begin testing.
Their initial testing on the second OpenStack release identified several issues that prevented them from becoming productive, however, the transition from Bexar to Cactus just happened at the right time. Further testing of the Cactus release made sure that the cloud was ready for commercial use.
The launch of commercial operation and understanding by developers of the possibility of obtaining infrastructure as quickly as developers are able to consume it, determined the success of the implementation.
“The whole company longed for a similar system and the functionality it provides,” says Maximiliano Venesio, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at MercadoLibre.
However, the team was careful in managing developers' expectations. They needed to make sure that the developers understood that existing applications could not work on the new private cloud without changes.
“We had to make sure our developers were ready to write stateless applications for the cloud,” said Alejandro Comisario. - It was a huge cultural shift for them. In some cases, we had to teach developers that storing their data in an instance is not enough. Developers needed to adjust their thinking.
The team was attentive to the training of developers and recommended them the best practices for creating cloud-ready applications. They sent emails, conducted non-formal learning dinners and formal trainings, and provided proper cloud documentation. The result of their efforts is this: MercadoLibre developers are now as comfortable developing cloud applications as they were developing traditional applications for the company's virtualized environments.
The automation that they were able to achieve with a private cloud paid off, allowing MercadoLibre to dramatically scale up its infrastructure. What started as an infrastructure team of three people supporting 250 developers, 100 servers and 1000 virtual machines grew into a team of 10 people supporting more than 500 developers, 2000 servers and 12,000 VMs.
Workday: Creating a Business Case for OpenStack
For the team at Workday, a SaaS company, the decision to accept OpenStack was not so much operational as strategic.
Workday’s path to introducing a private cloud began in 2013, when company executives agreed to invest in a broad software-defined data center (SDDC) initiative. The hope for this initiative was to achieve greater automation, innovate and increase the efficiency of data centers.
Workday created its vision of a private cloud between the company's infrastructure, engineering and operations teams, and an agreement was reached to launch a research initiative. Workday hired Carmine Remi as director of cloud solutions to lead the change.
Rimi's first task at Workday was to expand the original business case to a large part of the company.
The cornerstone of the business case was increasing flexibility with SDDC. This increased flexibility would help the company fulfill its wishes for continuous software deployment with zero downtime. The SDDC API was designed to enable Workday application and platform development teams to innovate in a previously inaccessible way.
The effectiveness of the equipment was also taken into account in the business case. Workday sets ambitious goals to increase the utilization of existing equipment and data center resources.
“We found that we already have an intermediate layer technology that can take advantage of the private cloud.” This middleware has already been used to deploy dev / test environments in public clouds. With the help of a private cloud, we could expand this software to create a hybrid cloud solution. Using a hybrid cloud strategy, Workday can migrate workloads between public and private clouds, which will maximize equipment utilization, providing savings for businessFinally, Rimi’s cloud strategy pointed out that simple stateless workloads and their horizontal scaling will allow Workday to start using its private cloud with less risk and achieve the maturity of cloud operations in a natural way.
“You can start the plan and learn how to manage a new cloud with a small workload, akin to traditional R&D, which allows you to experiment in safe conditions,” Rimi suggested.
With a solid business case, Rimi rated several well-known private cloud platforms, including OpenStack, for a wide range of evaluation criteria, which included the openness of each platform, ease of use, flexibility, reliability, resilience, availability of support and community, as well as potential. Based on the results of their assessment, Rimi and his team selected OpenStack and set about creating a private cloud ready for commercial use.
With the successful launch of its first viable OpenStack cloud, Workday continues to push for a broader rollout of the new SDDC. To achieve this, Rimi uses a multi-stakeholder approach that focuses on:
- focus on cloud-ready workloads, especially on stateless applications in the portfolio
- defining criteria and the process of migration
- setting development goals for migrating these applications
- Communicating and educating Workday stakeholder groups using OpenStack meetings, demos, videos, and training
“Our cloud supports a variety of workloads, some in production, others in preparation for commercial use. Ultimately, we want to migrate all workloads, and I expect that we will reach a tipping point when we see a sudden stream of activity. We prepare the system in parts every day to be able to cope with this level of activity when the time comes.
Bestbuy: breaking bans
Electronics retail chain BestBuy has annual revenue of $ 43 billion and 140,000 employees, being the largest of the companies listed in the article. And therefore, while the processes used by the bestbuy.com infrastructure team in preparing the private cloud based on OpenStack are not unique, the flexibility with which they applied these processes is impressive.
To implement their first OpenStack cloud at BestBuy, Steve Eastham, Web Solutions Director and Joel Crabb, Chief Architect, had to rely on creativity to overcome the many barriers that stood in their way.
The BestBuy OpenStack initiative grew in early 2011 from trying to understand the various business processes associated with the release processes of the bestbuy.com e-commerce site. These efforts have revealed significant inefficiencies in quality assurance processes. The quality control process brought significant costs for every major release of the site, which took place two to four times a year. A significant part of these costs was associated with manually setting up the environment, reconciling discrepancies, and resolving resource availability issues.
To address these issues, bestbuy.com launched the “On-Demand Quality Control” initiative, led by Steve Eastham and Joel Crabb, to identify and resolve bottlenecks in the bestbuy.com quality control process. Among the main recommendations of this project were the automation of quality control processes and the provision of self-service tools to user groups.
Although Steve Eastham and Joel Crabb were able to use the prospect of very significant quality control costs to justify investing in a private cloud, they quickly ran into a problem: although approval for the project was received, there was no funding for the project. There was no budget for the purchase of equipment for the project.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and the team took a new approach to financing the cloud: they changed the budget for two developers with another team that had a budget for equipment.
On the budget they intended to buy the equipment necessary for the project. Having contacted HP, their equipment supplier at the time, they set about optimizing the offer. Thanks to thorough negotiations and an acceptable reduction in equipment requirements, they were able to cut equipment costs by almost half.
In the same vein, Steve Eastham and Joel Crabb made a deal with the network team of the company, taking advantage of the existing capacity of the existing core, saving the typical costs associated with the purchase of new network equipment.
“We stood on rather thin ice,” said Steve Eastham. - This was not a common practice at BestBuy either at that time or now. We acted below the radar level. We could get a reprimand, but we managed to avoid it.
Overcoming financial difficulties was only the first of many obstacles. At that time, there was practically no opportunity to find OpenStack experts for the project. Thus, they had to create a team from scratch by connecting in a team of traditional Java developers and system administrators.
“We just put them in one room and said,“ Find out how to work with this system, ”says Joel Crabb. - One of the Java developers told us: “This is crazy, you cannot do it. I don’t know what you are talking about. ”
We had to combine the different styles of the two types of teams in order to get the desired result - a software-driven, testable, phased development process.Stimulating the team at an early stage of the project allowed them to get some impressive victories. They were able to quickly replace the outdated development environment, reduce the number of quality control environments (QA) and in the process of transformation they got the way the new groups work and the speed of application delivery.
Their success has provided a good opportunity to ask for additional resources for their private cloud initiative. And this time they had support at the top management level of the company.
Steve Eastham and Joel Crabb received the funding needed to hire additional staff and five new equipment racks. The first cloud in this wave of projects was the OpenStack environment, which launched the Hadoop cluster for analytics. And it is already in commercial operation.
Conclusion
The stories of MercadoLibre, Workday and Best Buy have a number of principles that can guide you along the path of successful implementation of OpenStack: be open to the needs of developers, business and other potential users; work within the framework of the established processes of your company; cooperation with other organizations; and be prepared to act outside the rules when necessary. These are all valuable soft-skills that are good to have with the OpenStack cloud.
There is no ideal way to implement OpenStack in your company - the implementation path depends on many factors related to both you and your company and the situation you are in.And although this fact can be confusing for OpenStack fans who are interested in how to implement their first project, nevertheless this is a positive point of view. This means that there is no limit to how far you can go with OpenStack. What you can achieve is limited only by your creativity and resourcefulness.
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