Cisco’s version of an OpenStack private cloud helps Photobucket ease implementation and management of networking issues.
Photobucket is using a Cisco-built OpenStack cloud to higher compete with the heavily financed Instagram, Pinterest, and Flickr as an entire life destination for users’ photos.
Photobucket stores personal photos, provides editing tools, and generates a link to users’ photos that allows you to be displayed in documents or on other websites without being uploaded to these destinations.
The 10-year-old, 74-employee company was your complete buzz. Now it has to compete with Pinterest, which desires to be everyone’s lifetime scrapbook site for photos, videos, and documents. In late October, Pinterest garnered $225 million in venture capital to expand its services, following $200 million it received in February. Its estimated valuation is $3.8 billion.
Photobucket knows it lags behind Instagram, the moment sharing service that adds a telegram-like ability to deliver images wherever its users want. But Photobucket figures it has edged in advance of Flickr, since it hosts 4 billion transactions an afternoon, has links to three million websites, hosts 20 million unique visitors a month, and stores 14 billion pictures.
[Want more on how Photobucket uses mobile applications? See Help Wanted 2.0: SMB Recruiting Goes Mobile.]
Given the character of the contest, Photobucket sought to function within the most well known manner possible. It knows that fractions of a penny saved in a single portion of its operations would support other operations as an extended, competitive race runs itself out.
These challenges prompted Mike Clark, Photobucket’s co-founder and CTO, and Jay Kistler, its director of operations, to go looking for easy methods to reorganize its infrastructure in 2012. Kistler realized that server utilization was only within the 15%-20% range for 800 bare-metal servers. Virtualization would improve that, but how should it virtualize?
Key staff members began OpenStack pilots in what was still an early version of the open-source cloud software. The employees members “dove in” and located OpenStack a somewhat unruly amalgamation of code on the time, Kistler told us. “It is not for the faint of heart.” Particularly baffling was the Quantum networking a part of OpenStack (now renamed Neutron), which proposed a brand new solution to do networking within the cloud. Kistler and Clark weren’t too sure how its software-defined way to virtualized networking was going to play out.
“We really are a robust command-line company,” Kistler said. IT operations were ok with Cisco’s converged solution to racks of servers, network switches, and storage in its unified computing system (UCS) architecture, but they did not want an all-proprietary Cisco cloud.
Cisco was happy to assist Photobucket implement a Cisco version of OpenStack on top of UCS. Now, rather than 800 bare-metal servers, Photobucket operates MySQL databases serving content from 350-400 physical servers. Hadoop analytics (necessary to understanding what users are doing and the way they’re using Photobucket servers) also runs unvirtualized on a bare-metal cluster. The remainder of operations run at the OpenStack Cloud, which has cut one other 350-400 servers all the way down to two UCS clusters — one running in Denver and one in Phoenix. Both are operated from one management console as a single OpenStack cloud.
The Cisco distribution of OpenStack features a plugin for OpenStack’s Quantum networking that works with the Nexus 1000 switch for multiple virtual machines and Cisco’s accompanying networking fabric. Clark said choosing this feature saved Photobucket the duty of deciphering an emerging and rapidly changing portion of the OpenStack cloud. “It requires some real technical acumen to face up an OpenStack cloud.”
Photobucket has gone its own way with the Salt open-source configuration and deployment engine, written in Python, the popular language of the firm’s developer teams.
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