Leveraging OpenStack at Scale: How the Elastic Cloud Drives Innovation VelocityJonathan ChiangComcastAugust 23, 2016

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High Speed Internet

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IP TelephonyHome Security / AutomationUniversal Parks

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Stretching the Comcast Elastic Cloud | Our Journey with OpenStack• Petabyte of Memory and One Million vCPU Cores in 2016• Multi-Petabyte Ceph Block and Object Storage• Multi-Terabyte SSD• Deployed across 34 Regions

• National and Regional Data Centers• Icehouse Release Today, Moving Directly to Mitaka

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Community Contributions• Lines of code: 73,000• Commits: 1100• Core Developers and Reviewers on Multiple Projects• Since Vancouver Summit (Kilo), Comcast has increased

its contributions by 50%

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Comcast Elastic Cloud: A Powerful Platform for Critical Services

X1 Residential e-mail

Big data and network

telemetry

Product development

Virtual network functions

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Xfinity X1 • Customized Apps• Social Media Integration• Personalized and Dynamic

TV Experience• Cloud DVR

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Residential Email Services and Product Development

• Tens of Millions of Users• Terabytes of data

• Hundreds of Applications• Critical Part of Multiple CI/CD

Pipelines• Accelerating Innovation• Container Orchestration

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Big Data on Elastic Cloud• Big data analysis of network

performance and telemetry• Leverages CEC compute instances

with ephemeral storage• Swift used for data lake/unified central

storage

Cluster Node VM

OpenStack Swift (Data Lake)

Root Volume

CE

PH

libv

irt

Ephemeral(Local Disk)

Cinder Volume(HDFS)

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Challenges to Overcome in Order to Increase Business Velocity

• Converge our infrastructure to meet the demands of modern workloads

• Increase operational efficiency

• Performance and scalability

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Converging Our Infrastructure to Meet the Demands of Modern Workloads: Storage

Modern storage requirements demand:• Provisioned IOPs• High read/write throughput• Quality of Service • Persistent container storage

But add the complexity of:• Noisy neighbors• Convergence vs disaggregation• Operational awareness• Cost

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Converging Our Infrastructure to Meet the Demands of Modern Workloads: NFVVNFs have complex requirements:• High bandwidth, IO, while exhibiting extremely low latency • Predictable and consistent CPU performance• High availability and resiliency

But introduce the challenges of:• Multi-tenancy• Operational complexity• Vendor reliance• Cost

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Increase Operational Efficiency

An ideal operational environment would encompass:• Clear and concise reference architecture • Automated and repeatable deployment model• Consistent upgrade path and backwards compatibility• Visibility into the full stack to understand issues and make

better decisions

Introduce the challenges:• Multiple deployment methodologies• Difficulty upgrading• Unsupported APIs• Robust instrumentation and monitoring

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Performance and Scalability

Growth of our Elastic Cloud:• Year over year increase in demand• Increase in data acquisition and retention

Are testing the limits of:• OpenStack networking• Control plane capabilities

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Addressing the Challenges• Collaborate with large scale operators

• Continue to contribute to the community

• Embrace a chaotic environment

Thank You

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