MESSAGE
| DATE | 2016-06-30 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout-NYLXS] =?utf-8?q?How_Linux_and_Open_Source_Are_Powering_?=
|
https://www.linux.com/news/how-linux-and-open-source-are-powering-comcasts-massive-infrastructure
Swapnil Bhartiya
June 30, 2016
How Linux and Open Source Are Powering Comcast’s Massive Infrastructure
network-comcast.jpg
network
Open source plays an important role in the Comcast ecosystem.
Creative Commons Zero
Comcast is the nation’s largest Internet service provider. In 2015 the
company had more than 23.76 million high-speed data subscribers and 22.4
million video subscribers. To serve these customers, Comcast deals with
a massive amount of data.
Let me give you an idea of how data usage is growing on Comcast’s WiFi
network: In 2012, Comcast recorded 1.2 million GB of data traffic. In
2013, it more than doubled to 6.9 million GB of data traffic. It
skyrocketed in 2014 when the company recorded 74.8 million GB of data.
And in 2015, Comcast recorded 445.8 million GB (or 445.8 PB) of traffic
on its Xfinity WiFi network, according to FierceWireless.
To put it in perspective: Comcast’s WiFi data usage grew from modest 1.2
million GB in 2012 to 445.8 million GB in a mere 4 years! And things are
going to get even more intense with virtual reality, 4K Xbox and PS4
gaming, YouTube, Netflix, HBO Now, and Hulu all piping their data
through network of ISPs like Comcast. Can you imagine how much data
Comcast will be dealing with in 2017?
mark-muehl.png
Mark Muehl
Mark Muehl, SVP Platform Technologies at Comcast
Used with permission
To power these services, Comcast is running a massive infrastructure.
Like any other big company, Comcast runs a large data center for
application work. At the same time, as a service provider and
telecommunications company, they also have a distributed network to
deliver lots of different services.
“We're spending a lot of time and energy figuring out how to make our
networks smarter. To extend the capabilities of our network.” Mark
Muehl, SVP Platform Technologies at Comcast told me in an interview.
And open source is playing a very big role in Comcast’s empire.
“Today, open source plays an important role throughout that ecosystem
and the types of problems that we're looking at for the foreseeable
future, and a lot of them in fact are around the need for us to be more
nimble in networking,” said Muehl.
Open Source at Comcast
Comcast is a heavy user of Linux, and it touches everything: from
back-end servers to customer facing devices like X1 products. Muehl
said. “Comcast, like so many others, is a very Linux-heavy operating
system company.”
Comcast’s choice of Linux flavors is interesting. “Generally speaking,
we're more on the open-source side of those Linux distributions than the
commercial side of those Linux distributions,” said Muehl. Comcast is
using Ubuntu and CentOS.
In addition to Linux, Comcast is a heavy user of OpenStack. They use a
KVM hypervisor, and then a lot of data center orchestration is done
through OpenStack for the coordination of storage and networking
resources with compute and memory resources. Muehl said that Comcast has
roughly a petabyte of memory and around a million virtual CPU cores that
they are running under the OpenStack umbrella. As an operator, Comcast
does a lot of things around operations, and they use Ansible to deploy
and manage OpenStack at scale. They also use Cloud Foundry, but
according to Muehl that work is in the very early stages at Comcast.
Containers, thanks to Docker, are emerging as the most exciting open
source technology. Muehl pointed out that containerization is an
up-and-coming area for them.
In Muehl’s own words, “I think it’s fair to say that everything we do in
some way touches open source in a pretty significant way.”
Why Open Source?
There are many reasons why giants like Comcast go with open source
technologies. Muehl said that there are some defensive reasons, like
avoiding vendor lock-in to use open source. But there are actually a lot
of positive reasons to choose open source.
If Comcast has a problem to solve, there are three possible approaches:
solve it themselves by making an investment in teams and resources;
solve it through a commercial vendor that could build a product for
them; or work with the open source community.
The last option is where most companies go. As Jim Zemlin, the executive
director of The Linux Foundation once told me in an interview,
“Organizations have discovered that they want to shed what is
essentially commodity R&D and software development that isn't core to
their customers and build all of that software in open source.”
For a company like Comcast, the third option also means lower investment
in R&D and much wider support compared to single vendor.
Sometimes Comcast creates a project internally and then open sources
that work so that others can contribute to it and use it, said Muehl. He
compared open source with biodiversity: the more diverse the
technological landscape the healthier it will be. Almost like a
biological organism that's healthier and more resistant to infection.
Be a good citizen
Comcast is not just a consumer of open source; they also contribute
heavily to many open source projects. ”To speak generally about open
source, OpenStack specifically is one of the larger open source projects
that we participate in,” said Muehl.
Comcast has been involved with OpenStack since 2012. “We did a lot of
early work around networking because we needed to get IPv6 working. We
needed to do some traffic shaping and marking capabilities within the
OpenStack infrastructure. All of those have now been upstreamed,” said
Muehl.
Stackalytics gives a comprehensive view of the contribution Comcast has
made to OpenStack; they have contributed more than 65,000 lines of code
-- with Neutron being the top project.
In addition to OpenStack, Comcast also participates in many other open
source projects such as Apache Traffic Server CDN. Comcast has a GitHub
repository where you can see the projects they’ve initiated, but it does
not include all of the company’s open source work.
Muehl said that OpenStack is a great demonstration of Comcast’s overall
philosophy around open source in that it doesn’t want to just take open
source software from the community and use it. “We also believe very
strongly in giving back to the open source community.”
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
_______________________________________________
hangout mailing list
hangout-at-nylxs.com
http://www.nylxs.com/
|
|
