Openwest 2013 - 5/2 - Mike Wilson, Jun Park - "Openstack in Hosting Environment" (137)
Channel: OpenWest (old)
Date: 2013-05-29

EIG/Bluehost is one of the largest hosting companies in the world. The scale of our systems at Bluehost have been rapidly increasing. We are challenged with respect to how to manage such large server farms distributed across multiple data centers that are geographically distant. Although the main stream products at BlueHost still reside on traditional hosting platforms that have their own idiosyncratic requirements, we have been seeking an ideal cloud-based solution for an efficient management system in a highly scalable environment. We chose to leverage Openstack in provisioning tens of thousands of servers while meeting customers' availability requirements.

In this talk, we will present our use case of Openstack in a traditional hosting environment. Although it can be considered odd or appear to be a conflict between 'traditional hosting' and 'cloud,' Openstack has been a good decision with which we could successfully launch our cloud-based traditional hosting products for dedicated servers and virtual private servers (VPS). We also plan on utilizing other benefits that exist in Cloud technologies so as to improve our hosting products as much as possible. We have learned many useful lessons from our unique experience, including the scalability issues that we faced while operating tens of thousands of servers and the stability issues that each OpenStack subcomponent currently has, as well as the architectural design considerations while using OpenStack.