OpenStack Summit October 2015 Tokyo

“Someday, walls will be here.”

Les Nessman of the 70’s hit WKRP in Cincinnati fantasized that someday his open floor plan desk would be surrounded by walls, giving him greater cred among his co-workers. Everyone knew it would never happen, but they humored Les’ delusion.

Your data center is kinda like this.

Google, AWS, Microsoft, Rackspace, Facebook and a few others build data centers using lessons that can only come from massive scale-outs. It starts below the concrete and goes all the way to the staffing model—and how you buy electricity and bandwidth—all before you even start talking about pets and cattle.

Rather than living in a hyperscale delusion, embrace the reality that you will never run infrastructure at this scale, not even by half. And even if you could, it’s equally unlikely that your bosses will get on board with the Draconian ops philosophy that underpins hyperscale.

Instead, let’s glean what we can from those who actually need hyperscale and do it well. This session will highlight several specific examples of how OpenStack operators can learn and benefit from the hyperscale experiment. Commodity servers and homogeneous stack design? Yes! Evaporative cooling and 1:10,000 admin:server ratios? No.

If you’re interested in talking about real, tractive and actionable lessons of hyperscale that you can apply without pouring new concrete, then let’s gather in Tokyo and talk about it.