1) PayPal operates a large OpenStack cloud platform with over 10,000 physical servers hosting 100,000 VMs to run over 1000 services for their business. 2) They wanted to move stateful applications like messaging, streaming, caching and databases to the cloud but faced challenges with agility, efficiency, elasticity and onboarding while preserving stateful data. 3) After evaluating options like network block storage, ephemeral disks, and hyperconverged storage, they chose to use VMs with attached local disks which does not lose data when VMs are lost and has lower network bandwidth needs and costs, though storage is lost if the host fails.