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Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack
- ericcholis 14y agoI'm very interested to see how this all plays out. Despite their customer service issues, PayPal has a huge ecosystem. I'm curious to see if this speeds up their infrastructure at all, considering that their API and website have been notoriously slow for years.
- mullr 14y ago"VMware’s RabbitMQ, an open source middleware-type application deployment project, ..." Perhaps it's mean to poke fun at reporters, but this is pretty brazen.
- lflux 14y agoNot quite sure what you're getting at here.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoRabbitMQ is a messaging queue, Erlang based, not sure if it is owned by VMWare. I get the idea that either it is not owned by them, or the description is wrong enough Oddly quite a few build systems are now turning to MQ's for build systems - beats make and jenkins it seems
- lflux 14y agorabbitmq.com says "Copyright (C) 2013 VMware, Inc" and http://www.rabbitmq.com/mpl.html http://www.rabbitmq.com/mpl.html says "The Original Code is RabbitMQ. The Initial Developer of the Original Code is VMware, Ltd." So yeah, it's owned by VMware.
- mullr 14y ago> quite a few build systems are now turning to MQ's for build systems References? I'm curious as to who's doing this and why. I'm trying to think of a reason and not coming up with much.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agopybit, my organisations very own rbit. THink replacing Jenkins not make
- mindjiver 14y agoWe have started using a MQ to send messages between different Jenkins instances. For example to have long running test executions on a dedicated jenkins-instance so the main build-jenkins can be restarted without affecting the tests.
- ternaryoperator 14y agoCurious how you've set this up. What role does the MQ play? Does it ship results to the mother ship or a console? Or are you sending notices of changes to the test machine? etc. TIA
- mindjiver 14y agoWe have custom plugin to send message to the MQ. Other Jenkins-instances running the same plugin will receive the message and can act on them according to the configuration. Currently we mostly use this to send internal release notifications around, e.g. "foobar-1.0.0 released, find it here <path to RPM>". Kind of neat with a n * 1000 developer organization spread over the entire world. Currently the plugin is not open source but hopefully it will be later on.
- ternaryoperator 14y agoVery cool. Thanks for the explanation!
- mullr 14y agoMore than being wrong, the description is almost entirely without content. "Open source": true. "middleware-type": true, but doesn't mean much. "application deployment": not right, but also pretty vague itself. The text straight from the results page tells an interested party that it's an "enterprise messaging system", which should be good enough for any blog on forbes.com. I really have no idea where they got the gobbledygook that they used.
- TillE 14y agoUnless you're a developer, you'd probably think "enterprise messaging" has something to do with IM or email. Something like "middleware that connects applications" would perhaps be clearer.
- blantonl 14y agoPaypal runs on 80 THOUSAND servers? And it takes hours for me to even get a quarterly transaction log prepared for download? That just boggles the mind....
- ditoa 14y agoIs that 80,000 physical or virtual servers though? That ratio could easily be 10:1 if it is the VM count which is more what I would be expecting.
- bluedino 14y agoThe article says 10,000 servers, so maybe there's an 8:1 ratio
- ditoa 14y agoUnless I read it wrong the article says 10,000 servers going live this summer with the plan being to replace all 80,000 servers in total. edit: just noticed they sneak "and eBay" into the 80,000 total server count. Makes a little more sense now :)
- enigmo 14y agoeBay doesn't have anything close to 80,000 servers.
- smackfu 14y agoI doubt they are optimizing for performance of reporting.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- outside1234 14y agoIs anyone in the startup world using OpenStack? If so, how is it working for you? I'm always skeptical of abstractions but it'd be great to hear about any real world experience.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoYes. It runs. Its a VM. I can add and delete and image. Remotely. Its admin system is all REST(ish) and I did have a fully working auto-build system till they changed it and I have to rebuild (known API breaker, well telegraphed, unlikely to be more, I was just lazy)
- incision 14y agoNot in the startup world, but I've used it quite a bit. I'm a big fan. It's pretty trivial to get a basic system up and running and your basic functions for creating, controlling and destroying instances work flawlessly. In general, core services are quite reliably and reasonably documented. I've managed to create some sticky problems fooling with Quantum [1] when it was still in incubation, but nothing a little digging couldn't resolve. 1: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Quantum#What_is_Quantum.3F https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Quantum#What_is_Quantum.3F
- polskibus 14y agopreviously @ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5439770 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5439770
- GFischer 14y agoYep, that was the original source, it didn't gain any traction or comments. It's pretty interesting, I hadn't heard of OpenStack before, and the company I work for is migrating TO VmWare.
- niggler 14y agoCan we at least link to the original article: http://www.businessinsider.com/a-dangerous-sign-for-vmware-paypal-chooses-rival-openstack-2013-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/a-dangerous-sign-for-vmware-p... I'm stunned by the extent to which the forbes.com rehashing of articles crest the front page compared to the original articles.
- neya 14y agoIf I'm correct, Openstack is different from Openshift and Openshift actually runs on top of Openstack, right? It's more like an appserver that can run Ruby on Rails, Play framework, etc., right? Because very often I tend to get confused between the two..because of the vague similarity in their names..
- zb 14y agoYes, they're different. OpenShift Origin is a PaaS, as you describe. You generally run it on top of an IaaS such as OpenStack, although the hosted OpenShift actually runs on AWS (which is also an Iaas).
- cacois 14y agoOpenShift (https://www.openshift.com/ https://www.openshift.com/) is a PaaS, made by RedHat. OpenStack (http://www.openstack.org/ http://www.openstack.org/) is an IaaS cloud platform, maintained as an open source offering by Rackspace, and originally created by a partnership between NASA and Rackspace. OpenShift could theoretically run in an OpenStack cloud, as just about anything could, but the two products are in no way related to my knowledge.
- neya 14y agoThank you!
- daigoba66 14y agoWhat's wrong with VMware? Why would someone not choose VWware over something else?
- samspenc 14y agoIn my experience, VMWare is great and has a nice GUI, which lead to early adoption. BUT: it has licensing fees for each copy. This can be a big bummer for companies like PayPal that have a fleet of servers - much easier to replace to replace all the VMWare installs and get rid of licensing costs to switch to an open-source VM solution. At the same time, I could be that OpenStack's API is superior to VMWare's. With a fleet of servers, you want to automate as much as possible - meaning that at the end of the day, API trumps GUI.
- acdha 14y ago> At the same time, I could be that OpenStack's API is superior to VMWare's. With a fleet of servers, you want to automate as much as possible - meaning that at the end of the day, API trumps GUI. It reflects the bizarre decision VMware made when they wanted only sell to the top end of the market: the biggest customers are also the most likely to have the resources and incentive to build tools around that API. The small to mid scale shops depend on the GUI tools far more.
- waps 14y agoSwitch to virtualbox ... Nice gui, better features, open source, no licencing per copy.
- tacticus 14y agoNot really the same thing. they would be talking about vmware ESX\vsphere not workstation.
- coderforhire 14y agoLicensing costs.
- incision 14y ago
- reidrac 14y agoSo they're going to move to OpenStack Compute but... which supervisor are they going to use? I guess is not VMware (KVM? Xen?), but I still find the article a little bit confusing. Besides the quotes suck ("OpenStack is not really free"; well, if you don't know how things work you'll have to pay who knows), so I'm not sure if I can trust that information.
- dcc1 14y agoInternet to drop Paypal and replace with Bitcoin :D
- 3am 14y agoI hate cloud headlines. What's the hypervisor? VMWare is a hypervisor (ESX) and management applications (vCenter/vSphere, vCloud Director, etc). Openstack is only the management applications. And VMWare contributes the most interesting part of OpenStack, anyway, which is the virtual networking based on Nicira's OpenFlow. My personal experience with OpenStack (admittedly late Diablo release timeframe) was that it was borderline unusable outside of the developer setup of a standalone node on Ubuntu 11.4 backed with KVM (edit: and that was only Nova/Compute, not even including Swift/Storage). Anyway, very interested to see if this is KVM, Xen, or something else backed. Also very interested to see when they reverse their decision (probably after VMWare comes down on pricing by 10-20 percent).
- anotherjesse 14y agoThe Diablo version was the first version that really combined the projects. Before Diablo each system had its own auth/user system, api style, ... We've come a long way in 2 years :) Redhat (EPEL/Fedora) and Ubuntu now have built-in packages that are much more solid. That said, the way to think about OpenStack is like you think about the linux kernel. Most people want a distro, not raw source to setup their environments. Over the last couple years we've seen real advances in distros.
- 3am 14y agoI've kept up a little on OpenStack since then and know people that work with the technology. I'm sure the keystone integrated auth system (or whatever it's called now) really improved things, and it seems like people are making really progress with pushbutton deployments using the usual config/orchestration suspects. Congrats! That said I know more people would would be content to manage ESX with ovftool or some homebrew solution w/ the soap api than I do who would be willing to use the linux kernel without the usual userspace tools.
- viraptor 14y agoWhat do you mean by "linux kernel without the usual userspace tools"? Openstack runs on a complete system with all the tools you want to install, not some bare kernel machine.
- hp50g 14y agoI think this only solves the cost problem. VMware is damn expensive for what it is. I'm not really a fan of virtualization myself. We canned it at our organisation a couple of years ago. We had 30 ESX/vSphere managed hosts across 3 data centers which hosted app servers, web front end servers, virtual load balancers and some other minor infrastructure. The final straw was the upgrade costs. Not only that we had problems with volume size limits on our SAN which would require more expense and hackery to work around. Also, we couldn't host our database servers on top of it due to performance problems so we had to have dedicated machines there anyway. The whole thing at the end of the day just added complexity, expense and didn't improve reliability, security or load distribution as our architecture was sound on that front already. We've gone back to the original virtualization system: processes and sensible distribution of them across multiple machines. Performance, cost and sanity have improved. I can understand that virtualization is useful when your resource requirement is less than one machine but above that, I doubt there are any real benefits. It's snake oil.
- IheartApplesDix 14y agoVirtualization is a requirement for any kind of serious dynamic infrastructure.
- hp50g 14y agoProcesses are a form of virtualisation are they not? That's enough abstraction.
- wmf 14y agoOriginally, yes. Unfortunately Unix/Windows has accumulated a ton of global state (libfoo 3.7.1 not parallel installable with libfoo 3.6.4) and enterprise software is now so fragile that any alternative to VM sprawl is unthinkable.
- hp50g 14y agoWe run our software (and other "enterprise" software) multiple instances per node and they are fully isolated. Most is in JVMs but we have C++ stuff with no problems.
- babarock 14y agoSlightly relevant: If you're interested in discovering OpenStack, you should check out devstack[1]. It's a bash script that (git) pulls different projects of openstack into a machine and install them. The script itself is very readable, thoroughly commented, on purpose. You're encouraged to read it while the whole thing installs (which can take several minutes). Feel free to launch it inside of a VM (preferably running Ubuntu or Fedora), in order to avoid polluting your current system. [1]: http://devstack.org/ http://devstack.org/
- batgaijin 14y agohow does this compare to puppet?
- anotherjesse 14y agodevstack is a shell script. It sets up openstack from source, tracking master. It is what developers of openstack use to setup dev environments, run automated testing, ... There are also puppet and chef recipes that use packages (which is recommended for production deploys)
- xt 14y agoIt's an alternative to puppet. Biggest difference is built-in remote execution.
- babarock 14y agoNot exactly, it doesn't have the same goal at all. From the first line of the script: "stack.sh is an opinionated OpenStack developer installation". It doesn't provide nearly the flexibility of Puppet (or Chef). Devstack does one thing, and one thing (almost) only: get a simple installation of OpenStack up and running as fast as possible (predominantly for developers to test their modifications against). Puppet can handle much more complex scenarios, and is really meant to deploy production.
- xt 14y agoIt looks to me like both PayPal and HP Cloud are using http://saltstack.com/ http://saltstack.com/ to manage their OpenStack clusters.
- mkoz 14y ago"UPDATE: We have heard from Adrian Ionel, the CEO of Renski's company Mirantis, who says that Renski is "exaggerating the use case" of OpenStack at PayPal and that Renski's "knowledge of the project is second hand and therefore limited." Renski's title at Mirantis is executive vice president." It looks like they are adding OpenStack to the suite of tools they use at PayPal and not replacing anything(at least, not yet). Sounds like Renski is just a little over-excited when commenting about a platform he believes in.
- BroNamath 14y agoI can confidently say forbes.com is the worst website of all time
- ffk 14y agoA few things going on here, 1. According to Business Insider (BI), PayPal is using Fuel from Mirantis to manage its OpenStack deployment. 2. BI also announced that Fuel was released on March 25 under the Apache 2.0 License. However, the fuel website points to a form that appears to give free access to fuel under a creative commons attribution, noncommercial, share alike license, with additional licensing options available from Mirantis. 3. To top it all off, the CEO of Mirantis contacted BI and said the information about PayPal migrating over was incorrect and based off of second-hand knowledge (as seen on the update in the bottom). 4. BI also spoke to paypal who stated they are diversifying their VM infrastructure to "enable choice and agility", not replacing VMware. So, based on all this, it sounds like what really happened is PayPal decided to implement OpenStack to allow for a more diverse internal set of tools to develop infrastructure. A miscommunication occurred somewhere, which resulted in the BI and Forbes story. http://www.businessinsider.com/a-dangerous-sign-for-vmware-paypal-chooses-rival-openstack-2013-3#ixzz2OeJgF5JI http://www.businessinsider.com/a-dangerous-sign-for-vmware-p... https://fuel.mirantis.com/ https://fuel.mirantis.com/
- wilhil 14y agoWell, it makes sense... OpenStack is getting better and better with each release and whilst VMWare do add some cool new features every now and then, the price simply sky rockets and you don't really need the new features. For the customers who do not need much more than basics (e.g. just virtualisation, storage server etc.), it is just so hard to justify the price now. Just the other day I had a client who wanted basic fault tolerance and by changing versions, the quote goes from 6k to 47k! It is crazy pricing... :(
- SqMafia 14y agoIn other news, VMware has announced plans to accept only Square payments for all $4 billion of its revenue.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sgloutnikov 14y agoI think VMWare is going to be in some trouble in the next few years. A lot of opensource projects are picking up speed. One of my favorites, oVirt (http://www.ovirt.org http://www.ovirt.org) especially. Red Hat mainly runs the project, and is pretty much the open source version of RHEV.
- simplexion 14y agoAlso the fact that VMware licenses cost about $2000 more for Australian users than US. Not sure about other countries.
- yardie 14y agoI don't think they are in that much trouble. They are just making a boatload of money while they can get away with it. But they are working on multiple tiers: free, starter, and "OMG, Money"! That last one might not be around for much longer. If you look at their other offerings some of it is reasonable (VMWare Fusion) and others are set at whatever the market will bear (VMWare Workstation, vsphere Enterprise).