How Workday Bridges the Gap between Amazon and OpenStack
“We embrace this concept of ‘The Power of One,’” the CEO said, “where every customer is on exactly the same version, one line of code, one security model, one user model, one user interface.”
He explicitly called out his competitors, SAP and Oracle, calling them “Frankensource” organizations that conglomerate their multifarious open and proprietary technologies into an amalgam, whose contiguousness and continuity they spend far too much of their time maintaining. For more info Workday Training
Bhusri’s message preceded the announcement that all of Workday’s applications would run on Amazon AWS, as part of a multi-year partnership, after Workday engineers had completed an extensive technical assessment of all the alternative configurations.
“Amazon Web Services is a scary beast,” for The New Stack, just days after re:Invent closed that year. “It is a fast-moving, hungry hippo that devours everything in its sight. And it is Hotel California: You can check out anytime you like, but you will never leave.”
Voices Down the Corridor
“We do have a little bit of a secret,” admitted senior principal software development engineer at Workday. Magana’s key accomplishment there has been the OpenStack-based platform which hosts his company’s virtual infrastructure.
You read this right. The applications running on Workday’s 650-plus servers in co-location facilities in Portland, Oregon; Lithia Springs, Georgia; Ashburn, Virginia; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and Dublin, Ireland, have been and will continue to be serviced on a very sophisticated infrastructure layer based on the open source.
Since his involvement with OpenStack began in mid-2012, Magana told us, he had been personally involved with the open source effort for AWS’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) API. At one time, 100 percent compatibility had been a goal. But the community came to a collective realization, he said, that “we were always chasing Amazon’s tail, and we were not able to create our own thing.” For more details Workday HCM Online Training
“With regard to the public cloud — to Amazon, in this case, it’s an extension,” Magana told The New Stack. “I always like to clarify that we have a very good agreement with Amazon to extend our services to the public cloud. We want to gain more flexibility. We want to have presence in places where building a data center is going to be a big challenge. Why don’t we just use the public cloud? That’s the perfect scenario for those kinds of things.”
In co-authored with Intel and electronic health records provider AthenaHealth, Magana introduced the architecture with which his enterprise is hosting existing applications on virtual infrastructure, while simultaneously migrating new ones. It’s a system that utilizes , Jenkins for managing the deployment process, Chef for configuring workload instances on virtual machines, and for deploying and managing a hosted virtual network
Getting the virtual machines on which Workday’s applications are hosted, moved to OpenStack, has already consumed a stretch of time. According to the white paper, the move has been “a staged process, involving a fair amount of operational complexity, tools, training, and ensuring endpoint connections. OpenStack helps to streamline their progress by automating the onboarding and validation process. Workday aims to have 40 percent of their applications under OpenStack by the end of 2017.”
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