Why OpenStack? What led Comcast to choose and deploy OpenStack for private cloud.

Andrew Mitry

May 28, 2014

A little context

About Comcast - Two primary businesses: Comcast Cable & NBCUniversal- Comcast Cable is the largest US provider of video, Internet, phone services (XFINITY)- NBCUniversal operates 30 news & entertainment cable networks, NBC & Telemundo broadcast

networks, TV production & station groups, Universal Pictures, and Universal Parks & Resorts

The Comcast Cable traditional development stack has been…- Vertically integrated, closed HW & SW- Three to six months to deploy new hardware

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What are we looking for?

Platform Stability

Vibrant Community

Flexible Licenses

Ability to Scale

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What differentiated OpenStack?

Community is driving standards– Standards are hashed out by delivering working code, not by long, drawn out theory

Rich ecosystem– Multiple players (open source and proprietary vendors) in every project

Active Contributor Community– Healthy mix of operators and vendors continually contributing to the code base

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Vendor Participation without Vendor Lock-in

API Abstraction– End users interface with APIs or Dashboard to consume resources

– Self-service, automatable, elastic infrastructure

– Plugs into the ecosystem, leveraging same authentication and metrics resources

– Ability to change out underlying technology without changing interface

– Ability to run multiple vendors at once while providing one interface

– Allows us to continually improve (higher performance, lower cost)

Standard Infrastructure for our Products– Reference model for our development teams and product vendors

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Extensible – Catering OpenStack to our needs

IPv6– Comcast has the largest native IPv6 deployment in the world!

– IPv6 use cases

– Comcast X1 Video STB

– CDN

– Messaging

– Voice services

– DNS

– Small Comcast team able to add IPv6 support and contribute code back in under six months

Scaling OpenStack– Comcast is a Top 20 contributor to Icehouse

– Contributing code, documentation and expertise

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Innovative Partner Communities

Compute– KVM

– Xen

Storage– Swift

– Ceph

Network– Open vSwitch

– Openflow

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Enabling new deployment models

Removing barriers for our product teams– Resources are now available to our products on demand

– Elastic scaling allows us to better serve peaks and lows

– Opens doors for special initiatives (event specific applications)

Horizontal Scaling and App Resiliency– Encourages our products to scale horizontally and dynamically

– Moves resiliency up to the application layer where there is more intelligence

Regional Data Centers– Two data centers in every region

– Compute and Storage resources closer to our customers

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Additional Resources

Comcast’s X1 Platform Powered by OpenStack

Driving Cloud Innovation with OpenStack-Powered Infrastructure

IPv6 in OpenStack

Twitter: @amitry

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