Selected highlights from GigaOM 2013 infrastructure conference

1. 1
The future of cloud infrastructure
Francesco Bovoli (*)
VP, Programme Management & Infrastructure
(*) Views are my own

2. • Barak Regev, Head of Cloud Platform
• Only non-telco company who laid its own cables under the
pacific
• Selling its cloud to enterprises
• Currently hosting 3m applications
Google

3. • Tim Bell, IT Director
• Needs ever increasing computing capabilities
• “Not reinvent the wheel”
• Adopted OpenStack, opened a data centre in Hungary
CERN

4. • Hosting 19% of the web, with 200 employees
• Built scaleability in early days because they didn’t have money
to place all servers on the same data centre
• Still uses PHP, “not the #1 world PHP users though”
(facebook, ..)
WordPress

5. • Mario Mueller, VP IT& Infrastructure
• Now 3m vehicles are connected to BMW data centres
– Traffic infos updated every 3’
• Producing 1 new car every 30”
– Plants scheduled at 120% of planned capacity
– Plant manager have expectation of “absolute 0 downtime”
• Manage 110,000 PCs, 9,500 engineering workstations
• Built a private cloud
– IaaS, PaaS (DB), PaaS (web), PaaS (SAP)
– release 1 goes live in 2013
BMW

6. • “Millions” of servers
• Very important members of Hadoop
Microsoft

7. • David Fullagar: Director of Content delivery
• Netflix uses
– AWS for all hosting needs
– Custom built content delivery (previously: hakamai)
• Has 1 PB of content, preloaded about 100TB per server
• Custom built servers, with 75% storage, lots of network, low
CPU
• Application architected without cache, as “no two users see
the same movie at the same position at the same time”.
System optimised for disk reads.
Netflix

8. • HP used to “talk more than do” about cloud
• Now more serious, with Meg Whitman (CEO) and Ray Ozzie
(BoD)
• Adopted OpenStack
HP

9. • Lew Cirne, founder and CEO
• Industry says “If you’re not using NewRelic, you’re doing it
wrong”
• NewRelic is now an analytics company
NewRelic

10. • Scott Sneddon
• Startup
• Virtualised networks “the next big thing” in infrastructure
Nuage

11. • Nnamdi Orakwue, VP Cloud
• Focus on OpenStack
• Provider agnostic
• Big push in private clouds
• “Dell loves OpenStack; it’s fantastic and graining great market
traction.”
• Dell has banks, for example, coming to the business already
doing ‘things’ with OpenStack and that Dell is in the fortunate
position to sit on top of all of this
Dell

12. • Maryline Lengert, ESA
• Helix Nebula: European cloud compute partnership to
establish a multi-tenant, multi-provider cloud infrastructure
– Suppliers: CloudSigma, RackSpace, ...
– Customers: CERN + EMBL + ESA
• Prototype stage
ESA

13. • Lindsay Cassidy – RackSpace
– RackSpace is founding membet of OpenStack
– RS launched its Hybrid Cloud offering
• Hybrid = dedicated + public + private
– “own the base, rent the spike”
RackSpace (1)

14. • Frank Frankovsky, VP Infrastructure
• Realised most hardware are proprietary in design and
software
• Started open compute project (@OpenComputePrj) 2 years
ago
• Apply open source to hardware
– Started with custom servers, recently switches
– New EU data center 100% based on OpenCompute
– Eliminated plastic lids and proprietary elements
– Everything serviceable from the front
facebook

15. • Brad Garlinghouse, CEO
• “Rip’n’Replace” doesn’t work
– 80% of fortune 500 use SharePoint
– Documentum not installed, but widely used, we will support it
• “CloudNostic” cross cloud search
– “it’s not where you store your stuff,
it’s how you get your work done”
• Main competitor: Box
• “It’s all about security and control”
• Most popular features:
– Read receipts
– File expiration (on date, on dowdnload (“self-destruct”?))

16. • Nigel Beighton, VP Technology
– “Consume” cloud services like dim-sum
– LastMinute.com used to spend £100k in servers to serve
post-xmas demand – then played all year
• Tools for perfect cloud consumer:
– API
– Modularity
– Monitoring (zabbix, nagios, newrelic)
– Security
– Financial control
RackSpace (2)

17. • Cloud is all about private, hybrid, public
• All enterprises are building their private cloud
• OpenStack gathering momentum in enterprise
Summary