Perhaps following a model which Amazon followed with AWS, Snapdeal has today launched ‘Snapdeal Cirrus’, an open stack based hybrid cloud platform. The platform, which has configurations as massive as 100,000 cores and 16 petabytes of storage, is one of the largest open stack deployments globally.
Snapdeal cloud is built entirely on open source with OpenStack at the center, making it an industry-first in India. Cirrus spans across three data center regions, with a highly dense server architecture of 100,000 cores, 16 PB of storage and a robust 100G SDN infrastructure – an investment made by very few companies globally.
What is OpenStack ?
OpenStack is a free and open-source software platform for cloud computing, mostly deployed as an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). The software platform consists of interrelated components that control hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center. Those using it, can either simply manage it through a web-based dashboard, through the traditional command-line tools, or through a RESTful API. It was released by OpenStack under Apache license.
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Snapdeal Cirrus
Snapdeal says, that its Cirrus solution has been built and operationalized in under a year and is timed to handle long-term growth in traffic.
The team further adds,
The launch follows a sustained increase in online traffic at Snapdeal, where millions of users regularly browse, buy, make online payments and track shipments till delivery. The launch will also satiate fast growing demand for crunching big data to build personalized and relevant experiences for consumers. This move will enable Snapdeal to ensure that business growth is augmented with platform speed, security and stability.
Additionally, the company is looking to put Cirrus as a mainstay competitor against the likes of foreign solutions like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure among others, even though they do not run or operate on Openstack. Snapdeal Cirrus’s major competition will thus come from the likes of IBM Bluemix and Rackspace, though the latter has seen a demise of sorts in business, ultimately resulting in an acquisition by a Chinese consortium, just recently.
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Commenting on the launch, Rajiv Mangla, Chief Technology Officer, Snapdeal said,
In a short span of 10 months, we have succeeded in building an extremely resilient, scalable and secure solution. Snapdeal Cirrus is a fully automated software defined data center and cloud platform, where infrastructure is built and managed as code.
To India’s second largest ecommerce company’s credit, Cirrus is one of the few successful examples globally of a large hybrid cloud built at a scale of public cloud, purely using open source technologies like OpenStack and Ceph.”
Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation, said,
At more than 100,000 cores and 16 petabytes of storage, Snapdeal Cirrus is one of the largest OpenStack deployments globally. Retail is one of the fastest growing vertical markets for OpenStack, and Snapdeal is among a growing group of ecommerce players outside of North America who are embracing OpenStack and the open source approach in delivering services and innovation to their customers.
