Sri Shivananda, Vice President, Global Platform and Infrastructure, PayPal

Last year, PayPal served 162 million customers, across 203 markets and in 26 different currencies, who transacted $228 billion in total payment volume. As we continuously deliver experiences that delight our customers and scale to meet this expanding demand in traffic, we have had to disrupt traditional approaches to infrastructure through innovation. To keep pace with innovation at this scale and growth, we’ve been reinventing our core infrastructure from the ground up. As you might imagine, that’s an enormous project. In fact, PayPal is one of the largest financial clouds in the world.

Today, I am excited to share our latest milestone: we have converted nearly 100 percent of our traffic serving web/API applications and mid-tier services at PayPal to run on our internal private cloud, based on OpenStack. Our private cloud provides us with the agility, availability, manageability, efficiency and the foundation for innovation necessary to deliver the best products and services.

Our OpenStack Journey

OpenStack has been a key choice in our journey to drive agility and operational efficiencies. We have re-architected our infrastructure and processes from a traditional manual-build-on-demand model to a multi-tenant private cloud infrastructure with end-to-end automation based on OpenStack.

The first phase of our private cloud, based on OpenStack, was rolled out in December 2011 in the midst of the online holiday shopping season. We began routing 20 percent of our workloads through our private cloud, giving us more flexibility and agility. Since, we have continued to build on top a broad base of OpenStack technologies. With our private cloud infrastructure, we’ve been able to deploy new Java applications and provision infrastructure capacity within minutes - instead of days. It is critical that we have infrastructure that is available on demand for our developers to deploy to. At the same time, it is important we have highly available infrastructure that is consistently manageable at scale.

In leveraging open source technology, it’s important that we engage with the community. We’re doing so as an active contributor to several OpenStack projects. We’re committed to open source technologies because we benefit from the collective innovation of the community (others who are just as passionate as us) and we contribute back via our findings at scale and best practices though generations of upgrades.

A big thanks to our talented cloud team that is using cutting-edge technologies to build the next generation of PayPal’s global infrastructure and payment platforms. This empowers us to redefine the payments industry through innovative services and capabilities that meet – and exceed – our customers’ ever-evolving needs and expectations.