 From Seattle, Washington extracting the signal from the noise It's the Cube on the ground at OpenStack day Seattle 2015 Now here's your host John Furrier Welcome to Seattle. This is the Cube on the ground conversations. I'm John Furrier with the Cube Our next guest is Sabu Alamadru. Welcome to the Cube conversations on the ground in Seattle. Thank you What do we hear you work at eBay chief architect chief cloud? What's your title chief engineer cloud and plastic You're the guy giving the keynotes OpenStack here is having an innovation day and really highlighting the Seattle ecosystem of Engineer big geek culture in Seattle OpenStack also in the cutting edge certainly in the backyard of Amazon and Microsoft so a lot of big whales here in the cloud business What is the vibe here? What's going on here at this meet-up this big event this innovation day? I think I think there's a lot of enthusiasm and energy and Getting open stacks succeed and I see a lot of folks talking about what has happened in the past how how happens open stack has evolved and How the new kinds of workloads with Kubernetes containers are coming onto the cloud and this is really exciting and In particular at eBay. We are thinking of it and to an experience from bare metal All the way to how apps get written and deployed Across our data centers. I think we are able to merge all these technologies and create a cohesive stack That turns 24 by 7 Millions of users across the globe so it always seems to have a conversation certainly in the mainstream press or you know bloggers That aren't in the cloud business. Oh open stacks not going to make it and open stack is dead It's always something is dead You can't have a headline without saying it's dead But open stack has been resilient as a community every single time that conversation happens New stability comes in the ball gets moved down the field Share with the folks and we've seen some some consolidation last year will be in Silicon Valley next week And some of the people that were there last year aren't here this year, but the progress continues So share with the folks out there. What is the progress with open stack continues to get global global adoption? The developer communities the operators and you're one of the leaders. What is that? What's happening in open so here's the thing open stack is a Big distributed system and infrastructure by traditionally is hard. It's inflexible. It breaks. It's not malleable like like, you know softwares So open stack is what is giving us that layer of flexibility to make infrastructure, you know manage that at large scale and folks that have Treated open stack as a large distributed system and engineered a put operations around it have succeeded with open stack like we have Probably one of the largest open stack clouds both pepe pepe ebay and prior to the split PayPal and We took it as an engineering problem from around 2012 and and really worked hard for three years To actually to bring you to where it is today. We are running, you know a fair number of availability zones over 10,000 hypervisors Production workloads running dev workloads running CIs every workload that is coming on is running an open stack So we have treated it as a large system as a distributed system And we put the effort into it and that made this much work for us. How much production and non-production is on your workloads right now? We I don't I can't share the exact numbers as of today But over 20% of production of ebay.com is running an open stack and that number is growing and Because as we migrate workloads either we create new workloads as Our migrate existing workloads that's significant and so I want to drill on that because we you know We do the queue but a lot of events and one of the things we always come up is the conversation around DevOps And there's a little mystique around DevOps. It's not just software. As you said, it's an engineering Conversation so I want you to share with the folks out there specifically the kinds of engineering that worked well for you guys at ebay and Things that didn't go well and what approaches did you take and how did you attack those problems? And how did you ultimately arrive at such a great production environment when we started open stack in 2012? We were not really sure What it takes from open stack at scale prior to that journey we were we invested significantly in automating a data center we had a full layer of bare metal provisioning Tens of thousands of bare metal across across different data sets we have invested in that so we knew what it could take To do that kind of automation to provision racks in minutes and we did that before even started open stack So when you sort of know we're gonna get there But we're not really sure what the journey is going to look like and so we invested heavily from In 2012 30 even 40 in automation a lot of automation all of our engineers who are actually great programmers They ended up spending a lot of time in figuring out how to automate open stack deployment These these were engineers. They are not operators and they spend time How do you monitor network? We had one of the largest STM deployments and open stack in the world And we worked on that we we got ton of insights into how to scale it up It was awesome Of course, there were pain points along the way because we were learning what it takes every every every upgrade was a lesson How to do it better how to do it better next time so it was never Like a it was never consistent or like no hey We're cool for now. Well you're early at office you near eyes were wide open You kind of knew that coming in that there might be some trouble spots And you had an engineering team how did for folks are doing it now? It's gotten a lot better with open stack. There's some smoother deployments. There's still some engineering involved again engineering not just software What's the advice for folks out there now in the enterprise who have an on-prem might not be the scale of eBay and eBay's huge I mean you got a huge bare metal, but you know a lot of people have on-prem data centers What should they be? I think my advice is very simple treated like a soft software problem. Don't treat it as like an IT problem It's not an IT ID problem. It's a software problem. You have to invest engineering into it into how do you manage it? How do you make self-service work? How do you monitor? How do you operate all these things? You need to take it as an engineering organization not as an idea. That's a great quote She has a software problem not an IT problem. I love that. So so let's take the next step is IT What does IT do now? Services, I really don't know IT become software everything is software So as a software developer Breakdown what it what is a good cloud software guy? Is it a DevOps? What is DevOps as a cloud ops as DevOps evolves to go mainstream which it is How should companies embrace DevOps and what kind of software environment should it be? I think I think We adopted DevOps culture quite heavily in the last three years mainly to for us to learn how to deal with infrastructure and That taught us number of lessons. One of the lessons is that You need you need Automation you need complete automated platforms. It's not just DevOps You have to think beyond that like like with Kubernetes containers mesos These things are giving you that better abstractions so that you don't have to worry about investing in DevOps, but you want to take the next leap into into better apps durable Abstractions that actually are more easily to failure What is the key thing in Opistack on your mind right now looking at what's happening globally? Obviously they were just in type. Hey, you got Tokyo right around the corner We'll be in Silicon Valley next week with the cube for open-stack SV What is the current thing on the table that everyone's talking about and working on an open-stack to make it move? Faster, I think I think it is to me. It's it's a stability Keep it keep it stable carefully add features make sure the ship is not No leaks in the boat. No leaks in the boat not shaky in the way slowly so talk about eBay What is the biggest surprise you've had looking back now and saying you know inside the organization not the Not the folks who are engineering of outside of your group. What has been a surprise that you've seen come from your work? I think I think it's a agility. I think we we took a very self-service self-service approach from the beginning We put out our APIs in front of developers and we let them go while with it We put some constraints on what they can and they cannot do but That what what kind of constraints like security network The basics of the perimeter that let a lot of developers do things that we couldn't be doing They were being creative think coming around Like before we knew they were There were teams running, you know thousands of VM to the talker and see eyes without even asking us that that hey They want to do it. They went and ask for forgiveness. That's basically that's basically the approach the culture We want to have and you want that culture experiment try things ask for forgiveness not permission Okay, so get final question. What's the vibe here in Seattle? Obviously the the Seattle innovation day the open-stack innovation day here The Cube is on the ground a lot of stuff happening in that room next to us What's the vibe overall in Seattle in the developer? I think this week. It's all about containers, man It's all about containers. How do they play with every company's figuring out what it means to? Integrate come with a cohesive answer Some people are getting it right some are still thinking I think that's the vibe I got from this week What is the takeaway on getting it right? What's the where's the rubber hitting the road? I think I think there's a lot of talk this week Interesting, but I don't think many companies have figured out the right answers yet. Okay. Well, we will be looking for those answers We're on the ground here in Seattle. This is the Cube. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching We are here at the open-stack innovation day here in Seattle Washington. This is the Cube on the ground. Thanks for watching