Presentation at Sept 2014 Interop OpenStack Boot Camp

1. Comcast Cloud – Pushing the boundaries
Andrew Mitry, Architect, Comcast Cloud
September 30, 2014
@amitry

2. A little context
About Comcast
- Two primary businesses: Comcast Cable & NBCUniversal
- Comcast Cable is the largest US provider of video, Internet, phone services (XFINITY)
- NBCUniversal operates 30 news & entertainment cable networks, NBC & Telemundo broadcast
networks, TV production & station groups, Universal Pictures, and Universal Parks & Resorts
Our typical development stack has been…
- Vertically integrated, closed HW & SW
- Three to six months to deploy new hardware
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3. What we were looking for
Platform Stability
Vibrant Community
Flexible Licenses
Ability to Scale
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4. What differentiated OpenStack?
Community is driving standards
– Standards are hashed out by delivering working code, not by long, drawn out theory
Rich ecosystem
– Multiple players (open source and proprietary vendors) in every project
Active Contributor Community
– Healthy mix of operators and vendors continually contributing to the code base
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5. Vendor Participation without Vendor Lock-in
API Abstraction
– End users interface with APIs or Dashboard to consume resources
– Self-service, automatable, elastic infrastructure
– Plugs into the ecosystem, leveraging same authentication and metrics resources
– Ability to change out underlying technology without changing interface
– Ability to run multiple vendors at once while provide one interface
– Allows us to continually improve (higher performance, lower cost)
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6. Extensible – Catering OpenStack to our needs
IPv6
– Largest native IPv6 deployment in the world!
– IPv6 use cases
– Comcast X1 Video STB
– CDN
– Messaging
– Voice services
– DNS
– Small Comcast team able to add IPv6 support and contribute code back in under six months
Scaling OpenStack
– Comcast is a Top 20 contributor to Icehouse
– Contributing code, documentation and expertise
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7. Innovative Partner Communities
Compute
– KVM
– Xen
– VMware
Storage
– Swift
– Ceph
Network
– Open vSwitch
– Openflow
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8. Enables new deployment models
Removing barriers for our product teams
– Resources are now available to our products on demand
– Elastic scaling allows us to better serve peaks and lows
– Opens doors for special initiatives (event specific applications)
Horizontal Scaling and App Resiliency
– Encourages our products to scale horizontally and dynamically
– Moves resiliency up to the application layer where there is more intelligence
Regional Data Centers
– Two data centers in every region
– Compute and Storage resources closer to our customers
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9. 9
@amitry