>> Voiceover: Live from Boston, Massachusets, it's The Cube, covering OpenStack Summit 2017, brought to you by the OpenStack foundation, RedHat, and additional ecosystem support. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host John Troyer. We're really digging in to some of the practitioners here on day three of our coverage. Happy to welcome back to the program, a Cube alum. Not only that, a super user, and not only that, a cowinner Paddy Power Betfair, Steve Armstrong, principal automation engineer. Thanks so much for joining us and congratulations to you and all team. >> Thank you, thanks very much. >> Alright, so, we've had you on the program, bring us up to speed, you know, where's your OpenStack deployment going, where are you spending your time? You know, at the event and stuff. >> So we're just recently, last year, merged companies, so what we're doing with it at OpenStack implantation at the moment is we're migrating all of our applications onto it from the merged company, so we're in the migration phase of the project at the moment, so we just recently, just after Christmas, had the hundred applications onto the platform. Mayston, we're now up to around 200 applications, so what we're doing with it is we've got a single customer platform which is the Merscode base of the two companies, and then we're going to run different branding from it. So in terms of OpenStack, what we're doing is we're looking to do an upgrade in the next month, as well. We had the session earlier on today where we went through that, so hopefully that was insightful for the people that were here. >> So fascinating, I'll tell you what, one of the, you know, there are many challenges with mergers and acquisitions. IT can be atrocious. I've worked with plenty of companies, if they're small, the parent company comes in, rips out the entire thing, and puts a new thing. How's OpenStack, is that an enabler? Do you see it as a marked improvement? Any findings that you've got so far? >> Well I think with OpenStack, it is very flexible because we're using it as the Middleware for the whole platform, and so we've got different storage vendors, we can just substitute the end and then go to the OpenStack APIs, that programmatically control everything. So, it's really useful for us, so if we ever wanted to essentially use a new storage vendor then we don't have to rewrite all the self-service orchestration our developers are using and interrupt them, so that's really, that's key for us and our business. >> It's interesting you use the word middleware. I haven't heard that word used in terms of OpenStack, but you mean the layer, literally the layer, between storage networking the raw infrastructure, and the app on top. >> Yeah, so what we're really doing, we've created self-service template that our development teams use, and we then want multiple different ways for teams to create virtual machines and basically go the APIs directly, so what we've done is we've created a layer using Felt Works School, and where development teams fill in self-Service yamafells with all the details that it needs and then they can send them for structure that way, so we're simplifying it and making it user-friendly for them so that when they're onboarding an application, they don't actually need to come to the infrastructure team. They can basically self-serve against OpenStack, so I think that's giving them that EWS or Google Cloud or Azure-like ability within the private cloud, and we've had to really change the way our business is set-up to actually operate that, so generally what we've done is we set up different teams where they're more T-shaped teams, so you, in a T-shape team, you have a network engineer, you have a storage guy, you have some automation engineers, someone maybe from a development background, and what we really did with it, when we're building the pilot process, we tried to encapsulate all those different scales within the one team and set them up as a core team that would then go and build the infrastructure using best practices from each discipline. >> So a T-shaped in the sense that, the team is still cross-functional, what's the 'T' of the T-shape. >> So, the debt of the T is really the deep-dive expertise, so you might have a network engineer who has a deep-dive knowledge in that, but what we're trying to do is expand the teams breadth, so the breadth is the T is really the other disciplines that they are learning as part of that team. >> And congrats on the award again. >> Steve: Thank you. >> As they talked about the award, some of the description of why you got the award, they did mention, the words dev-ops and CICDs. You talked a little bit about an order structure and changing your org, and processes to do that. Now do you call that T-shaped, is that a dev-ops team for you, or how do you all look at it? >> We don't really like to use dev-ops team because it is kind of a- >> That was a trick question. >> Yeah, a leading question, so it was really, a. What we try to do is have cross-functional teams so really dev-ops for us, what it means, is more collaboration between those teams. We've still got teams at the moment within our business that are looking after the heritage legacy stacks at the moment, so what we'll need to do going forward in our business is bring those teams into the fold cause we've really had, I mean, essentially what we're doing at the moment, it's, like, gotten our bimodal, where you essential have more to, we're beltless. We need to take that to the next level and basically bring the people that have been looking after the other parts of the business because you need to maintain them while we're doing this new private-cloud implementation, along on that journey, so we're running training sessions now for our network engineers, teaching them mansible skill in the map, so it's really exciting time, just bringing on that journey. >> I actually think that's fascinating, because there's been a lot of talk about bimodal, type one versus type two and the word from the community and from the end users' raids, that's not sustainable. So, what you're saying is is indeed you can organize that way, but you've got to bring the old teams- >> Yeah, I think you can put names on anything, but generally that's what you do, you stand up, we stood up a brand new Greenfield implementation. You needed to people to go over to that, and act in a different way because OpenStack, it doesn't make sense having different styles, looking after different components of it, because OpenStack centralizes that into middleware, so it's actually quite difficult to chop that up into different styles. If you're going to do it, you couldn't have someone just looking after sender for instance because it's so incorporated with the rest of the stack. So really what we're doing is we're exposing that API layer to the developers and allowing them to self-service against it, and then we look after the core team, the maintenance of it, so we've done this with the team. Eight people looking after the core platform, and then we've got multiple different teams that went out and they helped the developers onboard many applications onto the platform by teaching them the self-service workflows and how to fill out all the yama files, and then if there's any feedback from them, we use a continuous improvement model to try and get them to improve the platform continuously. So, it's a continuum process and it's gets better and better each day, and hopefully we're going to speed up the amount of deployment that we can do and speed up take to market for it. >> Nice. So Steve, we've very much appropriated, you know, your organization sharing with our community. You're very active, obviously, in the super user. Talk about how you interact with your peers, you know, how that helped with your learnings, kind of that give and take that you have with the community. >> Yeah, so with the community, really, we come to these events, and we generally try to be as open as possible and just talk about our lessons learned. I think the OpenStack Summit's great for that because people are very honest. It's not like vendor-led. And met-ups, for instance, where they'll just tell you that everything's great and they're very self-deprecating in some of the sessions, but I think that honesty with the OpenSource community and the continual learning that you get from that is really key to actually looking at the problems, seeing 'OK, we're not 100% perfect' cause you never will be, and continuously improving as a community. So, I think having the belief then to drive with the OpenSource community is very key in that, and because that, I think, what you can do is if something in OpenStack isn't working the way that you want it to, you can contribute back and you can actually help make a difference and make it better. That's what we're trying to and there's projects such as Vitrush or Rickos and Alice's where at the moment you don't have a sense of plug-in, we use senses, so we begin to contribute back in write in a plug-in for that project so that we can use it, and then others basically benefit from that as well, so I think that's where OpenStack's very key. Your hear Edward Snowden's keynote, some controversial things in there, but at the same time, the premise was really if your putting your data somewhere else, like in public cloud, you don't actually know what's happening with, so that was something that resonated quite well because you have to look at what workload you want to run in public cloud and which ones you can run in private cloud, so I think it would really... We're just getting on to the next stages, and evolution and that journey where we will be looking at what workloads we place where, and I think that is where tubes like Cooper Nessus are really thriving, because they can place workloads wherever you want, and that's the popularity is so high. >> I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to your company's corporate culture that allows, you know, this movement. I think, you know, information's open, eventually the house always wins on these bets, alright, with so much information available. >> Yeah, so, I think for us, the way that we've been able to do this is we've had sponsorship from CT level and Director level down, and it's very hard when you're doing a grassroots movement of just engineers trying to do this from the ground up. You really have to have a company that believes in this philosophy and wants to take it forward. And for us, what we really wanted to was just create a platform that allowed our developers to innovate on it, and just basically make the best tubes possible for our customers. >> So you're a longtime OpenStack user. We're now here in Boston, you know, Summits every six months. Anything in particular about the mood of people, the operators here, kind of how you would like to see both, you know, we've talked about Cooper and Eddie's, you've talked about different modules that you might want to see, you know, some activity in, or, just how you see in the future, path of OpenStack, how would you like the community and the project to grow? >> Well, I think there is a lot of presentations on stand-alone apps in OpenStack, so you have center stand-alone for box storage, you have ironic stand-alone. We use some of those projects to actually build it out, so I think module-bar rising it, and allowing it to be used, you might not want to install all of OpenStack, but why can't you install sender for instance, to control box storage, and so I think that's really the future of it. People could take all of it, or they could take different components of it, and I think that's what we're seeing in the community. People want to be able to install sender to help manage it, and maybe not install neutron or keystone alongside it, so I think that's really where OpenStack is going. It will be a modular metal service framework that makes it up, and you can install the best that you want in the project that you want. We've also seen a consolidation of projects, that the results of talk are in that eventually making projects simpler and removing features. I think when we originally had OpenStack, we just tried to throw every feature possible in, and then you seen a sprawl of projects, and then that's not maintainable. I think what we're getting down to is just the key projects that then use going forward, So I think you see the consolidation and then stand-alone instances that you can kind of plug-in the edges. >> So, Steve, let me speak a little bit about your business. I have to think there's few companies, you know, at least definitely fewer industries, that, deal with the rate of change and the uncertainty in the world, you know, more than really gambling in everything, that happens there. Anything changing in kind of the relationship of IT to the business? How does OpenStack help you respond to a very dynamic environment. >> Yeah, so, I think the key thing for us, is if one of our competitors has a feature, and we can't compete with that feature, we just will loose our customers to that competitor. So really being able to change and use OpenStack to change the platform and get new products out to market as quickly as possible is very key for us. Generally OpenStack is helping is we want an active, active data center We have a 24/7 business. We really need to have that uptake. If we are down, any sporting event, our customers will go somewhere else to place bets. So that's really key. And, for us, we've used OpenStack across two data centers, and built that out, and what we're looking to do is scale that out horizontally. So, for instance, when we've got new applications coming up onboard, we can just scale out new ratchets in openstack, we use ironic. We're completely controlling the whole data center programmatically, and that allows us the ability to scale up the infrastructure to meet the demands so that people are not waiting on tickets, or not having the internal IT processes that are handling most of our firms, so that's really where OpenStack is allowing us to evolve is that flexibility in having a private cloud just like you would a public cloud with VWS, but we've got that in-house. So I think we're quite lucky, and I keep telling the garages that are working on this, this is a once in a lifetime project, and I don't think they'll really believe me until they get their next job, so I think they're being quite spoiled in this as well. >> Steve Armstrong, really appreciate you joining us again on the program, and once again congratulations at Paddy Power Betfair and the whole team, and John and I will be back with more coverage here from the OpenStack Summit 2017 in Boston, Massachusetts You're watching the Cube.