 Hello everyone and welcome to my talk this year. We're a little sad because we can get to welcome everyone at the Vexos booth Like we usually do and hand out swag But we are happy that we're having this in a virtual way So everyone can stay safe and comfortable wherever you're from whether you're at home or at the office or wherever you may be and another reason why this is It's great to do a virtual summit is because a lot it's a lot more accessible So a lot more people can join that usually are not able to travel So we get to meet a lot more people from the community and it's always great Before we get started, I just wanted to introduce myself a little bit My name is hint Nasser and I'm the business development director at Vexos In the stock we're going to be covering before we start just going to be a little intro about Vexos just in case you're not familiar with us and I wanted to talk about a few points that everyone needs to know if you are looking to embark on the open stack private cloud journey and you're looking to build a private cloud that is on-premise for yourself or your organization and So these points will be developing a sustainable Strategy navigating the complexity of open stack and understanding a little bit more about the capital expenditure that is associated with building a private cloud yourself So the Vexos part So Vexos has been around since 2006 But when it comes to open stack we have been around since it's almost its inception so in 2011 that's when we started taking advantage of open stack Software for our infrastructure and Back then Opus stack was running its second release which was bare and to give everyone context right now Opus stack is on its 22nd release, which is Victoria. So if you do some math, that's 20 releases which means that we've been around for quite a while it's nine years and we've used these nine years to build a A few solutions around open stack including our public cloud Which we have regions in North America and we very recently announced our news region in Europe, which we're super excited about We also have other solutions that are Related to open stack like open stack consulting and upgrades and and services and a lot more And we also deploy private clouds that we have Managed we they're hosted on-premise all over the world So To get started the There's three main reasons not main reasons but three Obstacles that a lot of companies have to make sure that they're aware of before they deploy they deploy their own private cloud The first one being is Developing a long-term sustainable strategy. So I'm sure you know this but When you're building private cloud, you're not looking to build something that is going to be used for a couple months Or even a couple years where you're looking for something that is very sustainable and something that you'll be able to use for many years to come and When you're doing that it means that there's a lot of decisions that you're going to be taking in the beginning that You need to make sure to keep Flexibility and that to keep in mind that things might change in the future. So a few items when we're thinking about Developing something that is a lot more long-term is making sure that are able to scale up quickly and easily Making sure that you're able to expand to a lot more regions making sure that you are able to use the hardware that you need to use today and tomorrow and Being able to add whatever more features and tools that your users might need so when it comes to scaling up in For your private cloud If we talk in the context of scaling up the number of nodes that you have running You need to take into account that this is something that will require a lot of resources and sometimes a lot of time so Anything from purchasing the new hardware to deciding on the right vendors to Installing the hardware and getting it set up and Making sure your open stack is scaling up to accommodate for this new hardware is Something that is not quite easy and quite straightforward. So depending on the nature of your industry or your company If you do have work clothes that do fluctuate or you do have Seasons or times where you are in need to scale up pretty quickly It is something that might be That you might want to look into as early on as possible But we're also we could be talking about expanding the cloud about more than nodes it could be that it's we're talking about expanding it in terms of regions and That again in the same con in the same way could take quite a lot of time because we need to focus on Figuring out the location of the data center and talking with the different vendors getting the hardware physically set up and This could again take a lot of time and resources from your team, especially if Infrastructure is not your business. You're trying to fulfill your clients needs. You're trying to build something You're trying to innovate and you don't want to be spending your Days and weeks and months trying to figure out. How can we come up with a second or third or fourth region? and When if we talk about hardware flexibility, so the ability to purchase flexible hardware not flexible hardware multiple Hardware options is is the easy part. So going to vendors and telling them this is what I need That's that's not difficult, but the hard part is making sure that you are Able to implement all these different combinations within your cloud properly to if the days comes where you need GPUs you're able to implement that into your cloud if you need multi architecture if you need to renew your hardware You're able to make the right decisions to make it efficiently and to make it productively and Another thing that you need to keep in mind pretty early on is Figuring out whether you need VMs bare metal Kubernetes or all three So you might be satisfied with Kubernetes today But you might be satisfied with virtual machines today And that is what you need and there's nothing more But there will be a time where you might want to explore into Kubernetes or Explore bare metals because there is a need for that within your organization or within your users and The last thing you want is to not be able to implement it into your cloud and having to have a different cloud that Serves this one purpose of delivering Kubernetes or bare metal and If we now talk about overcoming the complexity of opens stack itself the First thing that we need to look at is in terms of designing and architecting. So this goes very hand-in-hand About developing strategy that is long term So a lot of the decisions that are being made in this page are gonna be detrimental in making sure that the cloud is Going to be running the way you want it to for the future so When we're talking about design and architecture stage, there's Some of the things that you need to take into account from the start is for example the open stack open stack project So open stack itself has a very broad list of different projects that serve different that have different purposes and You need to start by understanding which are the core ones that you absolutely need and then to take a look and see What are the ones that will accommodate the different needs that you have if you do have any specific needs? understanding of these projects are Maintained to your expectation or if you need to invest some time in order to help maintain these projects and contribute back to the to the community Whether the projects that you're looking at are how do they interact with other projects that you have or different softwares or different tools That you might already be using so these are all questions that you need to decide on pretty you need to decide pretty early on Deciding things like the open stack distribution that you're going to be using will you be running something that is upstream or will you be? Using an open stack distribution from one of the vendors that have them available Things like deployment tools. How will you deploy open stack and will this tool be used every time you need to scale up open stack and deploy other? Open-stack clouds within your organization Deciding whether you want to do hyperconverge for your infrastructure deciding all the different Storage solutions deciding even on the different instance types that you are going to have in order to make sure that you are Leveraging your hardware to its to the highest ability So that you don't have resources that are sitting idle not doing anything and just costing you money And so this is these are all decisions to be made before we even start or while we start Once open stack is deployed unfortunately the hardest part is not behind us There is a lot of work involved in order to make sure that your open stack cloud is running and Running the way it should be so the first thing that you need to look at is making sure that you have a monitoring system that you can trust so Making sure that things Everything from your network to your hardware to your infrastructure Is being monitored at all time is crucial It's not enough to just have a monitoring system that alerts you when things go wrong You need to make sure that you have Proactive monitoring system so that they can notify you before things go wrong and you have time to Fix whatever needs to be fixed in order to not have any downtime Once you have the monitoring set up, there's open stack upgrades. So these Mentioned earlier that there's fewer leases that happen that has happened since open stack has existed So they happen every six months And with these releases there is new features and new bug fixes and even security patches and It's there's a lot of good things in there that you need to have on your cloud So just like any other upgrade is one of those things that the longer you take To do it the harder it gets and the messier it gets So you need to stay on top of it and make sure that It's something that you are able to do on a timely manner and that you are willing to invest the time and resources to get this done on a regular basis and Then we have just the regular everyday management in order to make sure that your Cloud is running bug-free that you have no issues that there's anything that needs to be optimized is being optimized and just keeping an eye Out on things to make sure that everything is going smoothly. So This is in a nutshell a lot of the things that you need to be aware of that will require investments in either time or monetary in summaries in some situations I'm talking about monetary Private Clouds are They do involve a pretty significant capital expense at the start Because of the way things are set up in a on-premise private cloud You are responsible for your data center for your hardware and everything in between so There's a big investment in the beginning to purchase all the hardware that is required That is required at the start and the issue with Capital Expenditure when it comes to a hosted private or sorry an on-premise private cloud is that it is unavoidable? So because of that If you are able to put that investment in That's great and it means that This a hosted private or an on-premise private cloud could be the right solution for you If the capital expenditure or any of the decision that we discussed earlier seem like You're unable to fulfill them. It does not mean that you could not have a private cloud There are other solutions that you can get that you could look into like hosted private clouds and with basically what a hosted private cloud is is it gives you the flexibility and security of a On-premise private cloud because you get to choose the location of your data center You are in total control of the security of this private cloud But you do have the ease of use of a Public cloud so it's really as easy as logging into the dashboard and just being a user of your own private cloud While everything else is taking care of And even in terms of capital expenditures, there is not any you turned it into an operational expenditure and You get to pay it off on a monthly basis Instead of putting everything up front So this is it for me If you do have any questions about any of the slides, we do have a Q&A session happening right after Before we do that. I just wanted to invite everyone to pass by the back so smooth We are giving away some a lot of credits towards our public cloud So all you have to do is just go there and scan your batch and if not, you can just pass by and say hi We have my teammates are there. They're great. Go say hi to them I'll also be joining the live right after this So I hope to see you there and I'm looking forward to hearing any questions that you have whether it's about our host The private cloud or anything that I just spoke about. Thank you