This document discusses Time Warner Cable's strategy to leverage OpenStack and run Mesos/Marathon on their infrastructure. The team's goal is to automate everything and make best practices easy for development teams. Their strategy involves using OpenStack for infrastructure, Mesos for resource management, Marathon for scheduling, and various other tools like Quay, Jenkins, Vault, StatsD, and ELK. They have made progress automating their setup using Ansible and proving success by fully provisioning a cluster with a single command. Their future plans include evangelizing the platform to help migrate more services and deploy monoliths, adding more shared services, and making the platform more turnkey and valuable out of the box.

1. Leveraging OpenStack to run
Mesos/Marathon at Time Warner
Cable
Kevin Wood
Time Warner Cable
August 23, 2016

2. 2
Agenda
• Team
• Goal
• Strategy
• Progress
• Future
Leveraging OpenStack to run
Mesos/Marathon at Time
Warner Cable Charter
Communications
Kevin Wood
Charter Communications
August 23, 2016

3. Team
• Mission
• General purpose PaaS platform
• Common point services
• Evangelists of tooling and approaches
• Small Experienced Team
• Seven people, many worked together in the past
• HP, UnderArmour/MapMyFitness, CenturyLink, Civitas Learning
• Lots of cloud, lots of enterprise, lots of production
• (I’m the new guy)
3

4. Goal
git push heroku master
• Automate everything
• Let teams focus on their business
• Make best practices easy and turnkey
4

5. Goal
5

6. 6
Strategy
Mesos-based architecture
• Openstack: infrastructure
• Mesos: resource management
• Marathon: scheduling
• Vantage: load balancing
Lots of supporting systems
• Quay: Docker registry
• Jenkins: CI/CD
• Vault: credential management
• StatsD: monitoring
• ELK: logs

7. Strategy
• Mesos; OpenShift; Cloud Foundry; Techtonic; Joyent
• Eventually they’ll all end up finding parity
• Mesos hits our key needs
• Around since 2009
• Demonstrated performance at scale (Twitter, Apple, Uber, Airbnb…)
• Recent case studies of similarly sized teams delivering effectively
7

8. Strategy
• Small team + big project = commercial support needed
• Mesosphere DC/OS (Mesos and Marathon)
• AD/LDAP integration, ACL implementation
• Production-ready packages (Kafka, Cassandra, Jenkins…)
• AVI Vantage
• Multi-tenancy
• Visibility into operations and service level controls
• CoreOS Quay
• HA out-of-the-box
• Good UX experience and security
8

9. Strategy
9

10. Progress
10

11. 11
Progress
• We think we’re done
• Mostly internal use
• Early adopters
• Exploration of the tools
• Discovering sticking points

12. Progress
• Automate first, critical for small teams
• No hacking in staging or production
• Using ansible, experienced with chef, salt, puppet
• Proof of success:
Teammate runs an ansible command in an empty Openstack project,
gets on his bike for a training session, and 30 minutes later we have a
fully provisioned cluster.
12

13. Progress
2015
Sep-Nov Research, evaluation, and test platform options
Dec Finalize selection of base platform; administrative activities to get going
2016
Jan Finish onboarding phase-1 team and start implementation; finalize tooling selection
Feb-Apr Finish selection of components; finish base implementation; start service implementation
May-Jul Automation; monitoring; end-user onboarding; management processes; HIRE ME!!
Aug Onboard early adopters; continued refinement
13

14. Future
14

15. Future
• Evangelism and adoption
• Help migrate services; help deploy monoliths
• Add more shared services
• More turnkey; more value day-one
• Resourcing is tough, Ops vs Developers
15

16. Questions?
Leveraging OpenStack to run Mesos/Marathon at Charter
Communications
Kevin Wood - kevin.wood1@charter.com
Charter Communications
August 23, 2016
16