Pulling Back the Curtain –CloudStack in Private and Community Clouds

Pulling Back the Curtain –
CloudStack in Private and
Community Clouds
Chip Childers - @chipchilders
#CCCEU | #CloudStackWorks

Insights from our 2014 User Survey
Private / Hybrid Use Cases

First, Some Context
• CloudStack may be known as a tool for
Services Providers, but some of the worlds
largest CloudStack deployments are
private and community clouds
• CloudStack also used for very small
installations, typically tied to dev/test or CI
use cases
November 20, 2014 3

Key Insights from Private Cloud Users
• CloudStack considered production ready by
it’s private cloud users - 54% of users
responding are running CloudStack in
production today
• “Ease of [use,installation,configuration]”
commonly cited as a strength of the project
• Users calling for a focus on stability and core
feature hardening vs. feature additions
November 20, 2014 4

Warning: Statistics Ahead!

Size of Private Cloud Deployments
10%
3%
# of Hosts
3% 3%
1-100 cores
101-500 cores
501-1,000 cores
1,001-5,000 cores
5,001-1,0000 cores
More than 50,000 cores
(blank)
36%
32%
13%
1-5 hosts
6-15 hosts
16-50 hosts
51-100 hosts
101-500 hosts
over 5000 hosts
(blank)
# of Cores
3% 3% 3%
10%
20% 58%
3%
November 20, 2014 6

Size of Private Cloud Deployments
# of Instances
33%
16%
3% 3%
32%
3%
10%
1-50
51-100
101-500
501-1,000
1,001-5,000
More than 10,000
(blank)
November 20, 2014 7

CloudStack’s Largest Deployment
(>40,000 hosts) is a Private Cloud.
November 20, 2014 8

Private Cloud Technology Choices
Xen Server
KVM
ESX
HyperV
Bare Metal
Network Isolation Tech
72%
19%
3% 3%
13%
OS Used to Run CloudStack
6% 3%
7%
3% 3%
10% 68%
VLAN
Security Groups
Open Contrail
NSX
Not Specified
Compute Tech.
72%
31%
19%
6%
3%
CentOS
Ubuntu / Debian
(Not Specified)
RHEL
Oracle
Multiple
November 20, 2014 9

Private Cloud Technology Choices
15%
18%
15%
27%
21%
3%
3%
3%
3%
6%
36%
21%
30%
18%
85%
3%
6%
3%
6%
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90%
Xenapi NFS
Swift
SolidFire
Sheepdog
RiakCS
Other
NFS
Nexenta
NetApp
LVM
Local Storage
IBM
LeftHand
3PAR
HDS
GlusterFS
EMC
Dell EquaLogic
Ceph
Storage Tech (Primary and / or Secondary)
November 20, 2014 10

“Be happy, but never satisfied.” – Bruce Lee
(What our private cloud users want from us.)

Operational Experience
• “Problems are often difficult to debug,
error information is rarely obvious. We
have to leave log levels on debug at all
times to track down issues.”
• “The error logs are to hard to parse and
find what's wrong with the environment.”

• “Focus on stability. I believe there is too much
focus on new features.”
• “Resilience. Its ridiculous the amount of
things that have to be fixed by hacking the
database.”
• “The QA isn't the same between the
hypervisors (and primary storage solutions
too).”
Quality

Case Study Time!

Private Clouds from Around the Globe
Map image source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BlueWorldMap.png

Use Case - iPerceptions
iPerceptions
Canada

Use Case - iPerceptions
Who?
• Inventor of Active Research software, a
customer experience and digital analytics
tool
• Long time SaaS provider serving the top
names in e-commerce and large
enterprises
• Supports over 3,500 Brands, including
Dell, InterContinental Hotels, FedEx,
Harvard Business Review, Lego and
Ford
Usage:
• CI/CD Pipelines
• Production
Tech Notes:
• XenServer
• Netscaler Loadbalancer
• ZenOss Monitoring
“The Private Cloud has increased our focus on our client’s business issues
rather than worry about what servers need to be set up to address those
requirements.”

Use Case - Cloudera
Cloudera
United States

Use Case - Cloudera
Who?
• “Big Data” product portfolio using Hadoop
• Founded in 2008 to create the first
commercial product based on Hadoop
• Built CloudCat to add a UI that supports
provisioning use cases for large numbers
of identical nodes
• Started using CloudStack in 2012
Usage:
• Continuous Integration
• Automated Testing
• Functional Testing
Tech Notes:
• KVM
• Apache Jclouds, Jenkins
• CloudCat, a OSS reporting and provisioning
UI from @abayer
(github.com/abayer/cloudcat)
• ~1,000 VMs at a time
• 270 hosts
“CloudStack has given us an easy-to-set-up, low-maintenance reliable
private IaaS, allowing us to test more configurations more frequently
and more efficiently.”
as it’s foundation

Use Case - Klarna
Klarna
Sweden

Use Case - Klarna
Who?
• eCommerce Payment Services
• One of Europes fastest growing
companies, and the leading European
payment provider
• 1,100 employees, 16 markets, 25M
consumers served, 45,000 merchants
• Were looking for a fast IaaS that
decreases feedback loop to devs,
supports QA building large app clusters
in minutes, increasing parallelism on test
and packaging
Usage:
• Continuous Integration
Tech Notes:
• 1,300 VMs growing at 10% a week as all
dev teams join
• Custom built a number of company
specific tools, similar to Stackmate
• ~900 VMs created and destroyed per day
“With Cloudstack we manage to have very quick feedback loops, even when
doing end to end tests on clusters with dozens of guests.”

Use Case - Disney Interactive
Disney Interactive
United States

Use Case - Disney Interactive
Who?
• Responsible for the Disney product
experience across all digital channels,
including web, mobile, social and
consoles
• Wanted a solution that allowed them to
leverage existing hardware assets,
allowed their R&D teams to accelerate
development and provide consistency
between dev/test/production
Usage:
• Dev, Test, Production
• Gaming
• Mobile
• Financial
• Identity Management
Tech Notes:
• VMware ESX HV
• Leveraged Existing Infrastructure
Investment
“The longer the private cloud was running, the lower our operation costs
became. More importantly, it made our operational process much faster.”

Use Case - Hokkaido University
Hokkaido University
Japan

Use Case - Hokkaido University
Who?
• Researched focused, national university
• One of the first CloudStack-based
• Largest university research cloud in
Usage:
• HPC Clusters On Demand
• Running Hadoop, Mahout, Hive
• Simulations
• Research Data Collection and Analysis
Tech Notes:
• Initial build supported 2,000 VMs (43.8
TFlops)
Future Plans
• Building a federated cloud
• Capacity needs in the Exabyte scale and
“CloudStack fills the gap between the PC and
Supercomputers.”
1 Combustion simulation ( Hokkaido University million cores for processing
Faculty of Engineering, Professor Oshima )
in Japan
clouds, November 2011
Japan

Use Case - Radialpoint
Radialpoint
Canada

Use Case - Radialpoint
Who?
• Technical Support Platform/Software
(partnership with ISP/retailers)
• 120+ employees
• Strong innovation culture (hackathons)
• Open source friendly but strong
• Software development company (80+
• Experimenting with different HV options
• Provisioning tools built to use both
Usage:
• Development and Test (Aug 2013)
• Production (Oct 2013)
• Continuous Delivery with TeamCity +
SaltStack
Tech Notes:
• VMware ESX for HV
• Cisco Server and Networking
• EMC Storage
• CloudStack Tied to Active Directory via
LDAP
• Teams using SaltStack to deploy full env
(VM+Apps)
“CloudStack is not an all-or-nothing solution.”
enterprise infrastructure
devs)
CloudStack and AWS

Use Case - Autodesk
Autodesk
United States

Use Case - Autodesk
Who?
• Software provider for the architecture,
engineering, construction, manufacturing,
media, and entertainment industries.
• Globally distributed engineering teams
needing access to systems to develop
and test
– Speed of provisioning
– Resource consolidation
– Centralized security
– “Get engineering out of the infrastructure
Usage:
• On-demand Dev/Test Environments
Tech Notes:
• Makes significant use of vGPU support
• 9,000+ VMs created per month in 2013,
with significant usage growth month over
month
• Goals for the private cloud:
business”

Use Case - University of São Paulo
University of São Paulo
Brazil

Use Case - University of São Paulo
Cyrano Rizzo - Director of Datacenter Vertical, University of Sao Paulo
Who?
• Ranked as #1 University in Latin America
• 11 campuses, 100,000 students, 6,000
professors, 17,000 employees
• Largest private cloud in Latin America,
• Cloud deployed as a distributed
architecture, with a core DC and local
zones in remote campus locations
Usage:
• Diverse Enterprise Applications
• Virtual Desktops (Over 3,000)
• Compute resources for research
Tech Notes:
• Using vGPU support
• XenServer
• “FlexPod” Architecture
• 38,400 VMs
• 246 TB RAM
• ~10,000 Cores
• 15 PB Storage, 1.5 M IOPS
“Cloud USP will serve as a reference architecture for all cloud deployments in
the area of education and research in Brazil”
came online Jan 2013

Apache CloudStack exists
to make infrastructure easier,
so that users can focus on their real goals.
Chip Childers - @chipchilders

Pulling Back the Curtain –CloudStack in Private and Community Clouds

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