
OVH ♥ OpenStack
OVH at the OpenStack Summit in Berlin
Alain Fiocco (CTO) was present at the OpenStack Summit in Berlin to present the OpenStack infrastructure deployed at OVH to the community, and to share the challenges our teams face every day when operating this large-scale global infrastructure.
#WeAreOpenStack
#WeAre a public cloud provider exploiting OpenStack on a large scale
OpenStack use continues to grow. It is now one of the largest open source projects based on its number of contributors and goal to provide a set of tools to deploy and operate cloud infrastructures. OVH began developing on the OpenStack platform back in 2012, just two years after the launch of this technology. As Europe’s leader in web hosting and number three worldwide, OVH is one of the largest OpenStack operators when it comes to public cloud. This is a rather rare use case inside the community since the majority of its members have been using OpenStack for onsite cloud solutions instead.
#WeAre a member of the OpenStack Foundation
In 2014, OVH became a member of the OpenStack Foundation with the goal of sharing its experience, especially in dealing with the challenges surrounding high availability, isolation of resources and scalability, all major concerns for the community.
#WeAre an Infrastructure Donor
Towards the end of 2015, OVH began supporting the project by donating cloud resources to fuel a continuous integration system, which is a crucial tool for the community. Indeed, a large number of the 30,000 jobs launched each day by this system to compile and test patches submitted by thousands of contributors are conducted inside OVH datacenters... using OpenStack instances! This is an example of what constitutes a typical case study for the OVH Public Cloud, a solution specifically designed to respond to a high volume of on-demand requests.
#WeAre proud to announce
150petabytes
of physical data stored on Swift
260,000
active instances
listed in October 2018
Public Cloud
Archive
For long-term storage.
First cold storage solution based on OpenStack
#WeAre in love with OpenStack
2012 - Swift
OVH looking for a scalable storage solution
Towards the end of 2011, OVH launched hubiC, an online file storage solution that met with tremendous success. Within the first year, 130,000 users were wowed by the service as they were using it to upload and store more than 40 TB of data each week. This resulted in creating a huge strain on the infrastructure and it revealed weaknesses in the scalability of the technical solution that was initially chosen. It was under these circumstances that the OVH teams first became interested in OpenStack and particularly in OpenStack Swift, the project's storage component. hubiC is currently based on this technology, supporting no less than 800,000 users.
2014 - Compute
High performance instances on demand
In 2013, OVH continued to explore the various aspects of the OpenStack project, first to respond to internal needs and then to build its very first public cloud offer. In 2014, OVH offered the first on-demand instances through its “Innovation Lab”. These instances guarantee high performance and are manageable from a simple client control panel, via the Horizon interface or through the OVH and OpenStack APIs.
2015 - Scaling
Exponential growth of the OpenStack infrastructure
The OVH Public Cloud product offer has met with great success in 2015 by setting itself apart with its "no noisy neighbour" guarantee (dedicated resources) and simple, transparent billing system (no hidden costs). This led our teams to start working on expanding the underlying infrastructure and adapting some of its aspects to the OpenStack framework. The North-South traffic on Neutron, for example, was transferred over to the hypervisors and the OVH engineers worked on the parallelization of the Nova schedulers to sustain the heavy loads generated by several hundreds of instances starting simultaneously.
2016 - Innovation
Focusing on innovation
The OVH teams have been focusing on improving the Public Cloud offer based on OpenStack. This work has been centered around three main lines: integrating OpenStack into the OVH ecosystem, adding new features like the vRack, which is used as a support for Neutron to extend private networks among several data centres spread around different geographical locations. And lastly, adding new software and hardware components that will generate even better performances for both the infrastructure and user instances.
2017 - Upgrade
Updating the offer and the infrastructure
The OVH Public Cloud infrastructures have been expanding significantly and new zones are being added as we are growing and adding new data centres. The catalogue is also being updated with SSD instances that provide more efficient local storage as users are inceasingly aligned with the cloud philosophy. And in the meantime, R&D teams are reviewing the process of updating the OpenStack infrastructures in order to remain as close to the version currently used in the community as possible to propose patches upstream.
Simultaneously, OVH continues to innovate by adding to its offer the cold storage service Public Cloud Archive, based on Swift.
2018 – Intelligence
Adding intelligence to both infrastructure management and workloads
Infrastructure-as-a-Service is not just about compute resources and storage space – it's also about mechanisms and automation. It's about the opportunity to manage your infrastructure with intelligent tools, such as orchestration services like Heat, or the workflow management handle by Mistral.
And there’s also a new type of intelligence in the cloud, computed on GPUs. OVH now offers a new range, based on NVIDIA® Tesla® V100, which uses the NVIDIA® GPU Cloud platform to integrate the last artificial intelligence frameworks.
Our vision and integration of OpenStack
OVH makes OpenStack more accessible to everyone
User experience (UX) is a one of the main preoccupations for developers of the Public Cloud user interface. The goal is to facilitate the management of OpenStack instances and storage for users who aren't familiar with cloud computing services.
Find out more about the OpenStack technologyOpenStack services will soon be integrated with the OVH vRack
One of the most interesting features offered by OVH consists of expanding private networks between OpenStack instances even across several geographical zones. Through vRack, instances can privately communicate with one another from one side of the Atlantic to the other and with a latency of less than 80 ms. vRack also allows instances to interconnect with other OVH services, increasing the number of possible use cases. The OVH Public Cloud is often used to relieve overflow of onsite infrastructures or infrastructures hosted on dedicated servers.
Find OVH on the OpenStack Marketplace

