Why did PayPal replace VMware with OpenStack?

Nearly 100% of the traffic going through PayPal and the API of the service, including intermediary services, is now served by the OpenStack private cloud, which the company owns.

OpenStack has replaced VMware in eBay-owned data centers through which payments are made. Transformations went in stages, and it all started during the 2011 shopping season, when the PayPal infrastructure team decided to transfer about 20% of the company's traffic to the OpenStack cloud.

The reason why it was decided to switch (one of the main reasons) is to switch from a proprietary platform to Open Source. As a bonus, the company was able to customize the software, avoiding collisions with the manufacturer.
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“With OpenStack, our company can independently control the customization of its software, we now have a large selection of suppliers of hybrid cloud environments,” commented Shri Sivananda, vice president of the PayPal infrastructure division. He also said that the company now takes minutes to deploy new Java applications - this is necessary in order to keep up with the times and needs of consumers.

The company built its own cloud OpenStack. At the same time, PayPal had a choice: create a cloud on its own, or hire a specialist or even a company who could implement their own solutions for PayPal. The company has chosen an independent path, and now the management does not regret it at all. The OpenStack private cloud currently runs on 4,100 physical servers.



It is worth noting that VMware and OpenStack are not mutually exclusive. So, the telecommunications giant from Palo Alto, California, received its own version of OpenStack, integrated with its hypervisor and other infrastructure solutions of the DC. VMware Integrated OpenStack comes with the latest vSphere 6 package.

“The goal of this integration is to provide customers with the opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of their own investments, with OpenStack and joint support from VMware,” commented Roger Fortier, VMware spokesman.

Currently, an increasing number of companies are paying attention to OpenStack. Others include such giants as Walmart Labs, Time Warner Cable, and CERN (operator of the Large Hadron Collider. ”Last November, CERN increased the size of the OpenStack cloud by 1,500,000 processor cores. Actively working with the OpenStack cloud and BMW, so far just testing the ability to work with a new infrastructure solution.

A recent survey among IT professionals showed that about a third of all cloud service users have their own private clouds. And half of them are based on OpenStack.

The positive thing is that the cloud open-source software has opened up the possibility for service providers to create open clouds. For example, Rackspace is one of the largest OpenStack clouds. Another example is Internap, which launched its own cloud services based on OpenStack earlier this year.

The shopping traffic of such a giant as Walmart also serves OpenStack. Rackspace helped the Walmart Labs team build the cloud infrastructure. Walmart is now working with the RackSpace version of OpenStack infrastructure.

Manufacturers of proprietary equipment and software, seeing the growing popularity of OpenStack, inevitably begin to integrate new solutions into their own infrastructure, offering updated projects and services. Otherwise, such manufacturers could well lose part of the market.



However, there are also companies like PayPal, which can create their own cloud infrastructure based on OpenStack, for themselves. Now the integrated PayPal and eBay infrastructure is based on 8500 physical servers. And this is far from the limit - news in this area is still ahead.