2012 - Swift

OVH looking for a scalable storage solution

Towards the end of 2011, OVH launched hubiC, an online file storage solution that met with tremendous success. Within the first year, 130,000 users were wowed by the service as they were using it to upload and store more than 40 TB of data each week. This created a huge strain on the infrastructure and it revealed weaknesses in the scalability of the technical solution that was initially chosen. It was under these circumstances that the OVH teams first became interested in OpenStack and particularly in OpenStack Swift, the project's storage component. hubiC is currently based on this technology, supporting no fewer than 800,000 users.

2014 - Compute

High-performance instances on demand

In 2013, OVH continued to explore the various aspects of the OpenStack project, first to respond to internal needs and then to build its very first public cloud solution. In 2014, OVH offered the first on-demand instances through its “Innovation Lab”. These instances guarantee high performance and customers can manage them from a simple control panel, via the Horizon interface or through the OVH and OpenStack APIs.

2015 - Scaling

Exponential growth of the OpenStack infrastructure

The OVH Public Cloud offering achieved great success in 2015 by setting itself apart with its "no noisy neighbour" guarantee (dedicated resources) and simple, transparent billing system (no hidden costs). This led our teams to start working on expanding the underlying infrastructure and adapting some of its aspects to the OpenStack framework. The North-South traffic on Neutron, for example, was transferred over to the hypervisors and the OVH engineers worked on the parallelisation of the Nova schedulers to sustain the heavy loads generated by several hundreds of instances starting simultaneously.

2016 - Innovation

Focusing on innovation

The OVH teams have been focusing on improving the Public Cloud solution based on OpenStack. This work has been centered around three main lines: integrating OpenStack into the OVH ecosystem, adding new features like the vRack, which is used as a support for Neutron extending private networks among several datacentres across different geographical locations. And lastly, adding new software and hardware components that will generate even better performances for both the infrastructure and user instances.

2017 - Upgrade

Updating the solution and the infrastructure

The OVH Public Cloud infrastructures have been expanding significantly and new zones are being added as we are growing and adding new datacentres. The catalogue is also being updated with SSD instances that provide more efficient local storage as users are increasingly aligned with the cloud philosophy. And in the meantime, R&D teams are reviewing the process of updating the OpenStack infrastructures in order to remain as close as possible to the version currently used in the community, so that we can add patches to the upstream more easily.
At the same time, OVH continues to innovate with the addition of the cold storage solution, Public Cloud Archive based on Swift.

2018 – Intelligence

Adding intelligence to both infrastructure management and workloads

Infrastructure-as-a-Service is not just about compute resources and storage space – it's also about mechanisms and automation. It's about the opportunity to manage your infrastructure with intelligent tools, such as orchestration services like Heat, or the workflow management handle by Mistral.
And there’s also a new type of intelligence in the cloud, computed on GPUs. OVH now offers a new range, based on NVIDIA® Tesla® V100, which uses the NVIDIA® GPU Cloud platform to integrate the last artificial intelligence frameworks.