OVHcloud is a cloud provider offering Dedicated Servers, VMware based Hosted Private Cloud, and OpenStack-based Public Cloud to over 1.4 million customers worldwide. OVHcloud has been an innovator in data center design and management for nearly two decades.
At the OpenInfra summit of 2022 in Berlin, we have interviewed Dawid Deja. He is the Team Lead, DevOps at OVHcloud. At the summit he also held a talk with colleagues. He discussed how they integrated L3 services into one of the biggest OpenStack Public Clouds. For instance, for years in OVHcloud Public Cloud infrastructure, every virtual machine had the option to get IP from the public or private network, with no option to route traffic between them. Such an approach brought two challenges. The first one is the global limitation of the number of IPv4 addresses, the second one is how to obtain internet connectivity for virtual machines, which doesn’t necessarily need to be publicly visible. To solve these issues, OVHcloud decided to introduce routers and floating IPs into their public cloud
During the talk Dawid described how OVHcloud’s Public Cloud networking stack looks like and what challenges they faced while integrating L3 services into it.
If you would like to view the talk, you can do so through the following link: https://youtu.be/J99KzKJ0YYo
If you would like to read are interview with Dawid you can do so below.
What is the most interesting thing you have seen on the summit so far?
For me the most interesting and exciting thing is that we won the super user awards. To me that was very unexpected, so I am very happy about that. It is cool to be recognized in this way by the community.
What is the most exciting news your company will share on this event?
I can pinpoint 2 things. One thing we are also going to present. That is about how we are bringing new features for our customers into our cloud. These features are related to L3 services, and to load balancing. The other thing is that we are fast growing and becoming a worldwide network of engineers working on our cloud.
How many companies are you active in at the moment?
That depends on what you count. If we look at the data centers, you could say we are active in 7 countries, however if you look at developers that number will be more. For example, we have developers for example in India, but we don’t have a data center there.
What was the most challenging thing you had to deal with during the last couple of years?
I don’t want to talk about covid because I imagine everybody will talk about that when they get asked this question. For instance, I was actually already used to working remotely even before covid as I live 500 KM away from the office in Poland. So, I was used to it. I think most challenging from a personal point of view is that we had to do a lot of transformations inside our cloud base to realize the new release of our cloud stack that we are finishing as we speak, and we need to pay a lot of technical debt to do this. That was a crucial engine to our code and infrastructure.
What open source development has been most important to you?
For us, the last couple of years we valued the development of Neutron most. OVHcloud is scattered throughout 7 countries so we need really good performance and network. We really focus on upstreaming as much as we can and we are as active in the community as possible.
What future open source developments do you have planned?
We have a type of load balancing in our cloud that is to be available, I hope this year. Another project that we plan to do in the future is to conduct some tweaks with Ironic. Those are the two new products we hope to bring to our clouds.
Why do you want to share the story of the integration of L3 services in your cloud?
When it comes to that there are two points why. One point is from a personal point of view. When I joined OVHcloud, 3 years ago, that was the first task I was assigned to as we wanted to have that in production. In addition, it is a personal story of the last three years of development testing and learning new things.
The other thing that I really wanted to share is that fact that OVHcloud has this unique scale being in more than 30 regions and having more than few 100 000 instances running on it. So, this gives a unique experience and view on the issues that we have with integrating new features and integrating our network stack. Mainly because our network stack is kind of different than the regular OpenStack and networking stack. So, I was very excited to be there and share this.
That was our interview with Dawid. What do you think of it? Do you have any additional questions to Dawid or even OVHcloud? You can ask it in the comment section.
