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Workday Private Cloud: Operational and Scaling challenges of growing from 50K to 300K
Private & Hybrid Cloud

Workday is a leader in enterprise human resources software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution and has been active in the OpenStack community for many years. Driven by the demand of rapid customer growth and increased security needs, Workday’s OpenStack cloud has grown from 600 server fleet in 2016 to 4600 server by the end of 2018.  We shall have 45 OpenStack clusters hosting more than 22, virtual machines, dispersed across 5 data centers in different geographical regions using 2PB of memory.

This talk presents:

  • The architectural evolution that we went through to support business and scalability demands.
  • The operational challenges for supporting many clusters and need for federated identity and image services.
  • Operation metrics collected from the production environment and future plans to keep improving operational excellence.
  • How we achieved performance demands of booting thousands of virtual machines within minutes by extending nova APIs to cache images on the compute nodes.

What can I expect to learn?

From this talk, attendees can learn: 

- The operational challenges of managing multiple clusters

- Best practices for improving OpenStack API performance

- How to scale an OpenStack cluster without compromising customer SLA (Service Level Agreement).

Wednesday, November 14, 11:50am-12:30pm (10:50am - 11:30am UTC)
Hall 7 - Level 2 - 7.2a / Helsinki 2
Slides: Workday Private Cloud: Operational and Scaling challenges of growing from 50K to 300K
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Difficulty Level: Intermediate
Tags: Arch / Ops Case Study Technical Chef OpenStack Tungsten Fabric Nova
Edgar Magana
Workday
I am member of the Cloud Operations and Infrastructure teams for one of the lead SaaS provider in Finance and human resources management, Workday. My current role as OpenStack user is giving me a different opinion about what OpenStack should integrate and how it can be consumed easier and more scalable for both Service Provider and Entreprise sectors. I have provided my... FULL PROFILE
Imtiaz Chowdhury
Workday, Inc.
Imtiaz is a Principal Software Development Engineer at Workday. Imtiaz comes with over 18 years of experience in developing enterprise and network management applications. At Workday, Imtiaz is involved with building an Openstack based private cloud and developing solutions for migrating existing applications to this cloud. Prior to joining Workday, Imtiaz served at Cisco for over 12 years in... FULL PROFILE
Howard Abrams
Senior Cloud Engineer
The last ten years at Workday has been a turmultuous and fascinating ride for Howard helping to craft a Private Cloud based on OpenStack. Initial prototype based on the Grizzly release, gave way to multiple clusters on different continents hosting Workday customers, with plans to scale to over 15,000 servers last year. With over thirty years of programming experience from C to Clojure, he... FULL PROFILE
Sergio de Carvalho
Workday, Inc.
My journey with OpenStack began back in 2011, with the Cactus release, working with Nova and Swift in Dell's Cloud R&D. In 2013 I moved to Workday as a Senior Software Engineer and helped building our private cloud platform from its inception with the Grizzly release and a few servers to our current HA setup, managing over 4,600 hosts across 5 data centers. Over the years I worked in... FULL PROFILE
Kyle Jorgensen
Software Engineer III
I have been working on the Cloud Engineering team at Workday for 3+ years, where I help to deploy and scale our private cloud built on OpenStack. I am passionate about Cloud technologies, Internet of Things, and large-scale distributed systems. I received my BS and MS in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, focusing on Cloud Computing reseach.  FULL PROFILE