How OpenStack’s growing pool of companies exerts a gravitational pull on large users, who use it to propel their efforts.

image

First Walmart, now Paypal: with billions of dollars of transactions now flowing through infrastructure based on OpenStack, 2015 is shaping up to be the year of the OpenStack-Powered Planet.

PayPal recently announced it is running “nearly 100 percent of traffic serving web/API applications and mid-tier services" to run on the internal private cloud based on OpenStack. The news broke just weeks after Walmart, the world’s largest consumer goods retailer by revenue, said it’s running more than 100,000 cores of OpenStack on its compute layer.

There will be more to come.

The ecosystem supporting OpenStack has really helped jumpstart adoption, as users have a number of choices ranging from startups to the largest tech companies in the world to help them build and operate their private clouds.

Walmart, for example, now has plans to build in more block storage and venture into software-defined networks using OpenStack projects such as Neutron and Cinder and is currently building a multi-petabyte object storage using Swift.

To talk about this major shift in the company, Walmart’s two cloud leads, James Downs and Amandeep Singh, will take the stage at the upcoming OpenStack Summit. Other large organizations who will be sharing their work in the OpenStack-sphere at the Summit include Adobe, Time Warner, NASA and eBay.

Stay tuned.

Mark Collier is a co-founder of OpenStack and currently serves as COO at the OpenStack Foundation. You can find him on Twitter at @sparkycollier

Cover Photo by Quinn Dombrowski // CC BY NC