The interview
Q: What is your name?
My name is Arnaud Veron, Head of Support and Services at OpenSVC SAS since 2014. I've been working in IT for more than 20 years. I was previously Solution Architect at EMC(Dell) for 4 years, and worked as Unix & Linux system and storage engineer for multiple French companies (Banking, Telecommunications, Public Transports).
Q: What is your product?
OpenSVC is an open source orchestrator. It is responsible of keeping hosted and containerized application available in a cluster of servers. It aims to be better suited to manage services with persistent data than Kubernetes, Mesos, Swarm, Rancher, and easier, more modern and api-friendly than HP ServiceGuard, Oracle/Sun Cluster, Veritas Cluster/Infoscale Server, IBM HACMP, Red Hat High Availability Addon, SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension.
Q: Do you provide your technology to cloud operators?
Some of our customers, who operates a private cloud, propose our software in their service catalog, either as a PaaS component, or more integrated as a SaaS component. We are not aware of any public cloud implementation.
Q: Are you a market leader? Who do you consider leader in your market? Does GAFAM play any role in your market?
OpenSVC is not a market leader. We pioneered service-oriented application stack deployment since 2009, concepts that later went mainstream via Docker and Kubernetes orchestrator implementations. As Kubernetes' main sponsor, Google has indeed a key role in our market.
Q: What are the unique selling propositions of your product? Is your solution different or better than competing solutions?
OpenSVC is simpler to deploy, configure and administer than competing products, making it a good building block of "many small clusters" strategy, where Kubernetes champions the "one big cluster" strategy. OpenSVC downscales gracefully to a 2-node cluster, so vendors can use it to build HA appliance for their software. The product can also manage data replication, either synchronously or asynchronously. OpenSVC is also an easy drop-in replacement for many expensive and legacy high availability softwares.
Finally, our support and R&D being 100% european, and organized to have engineer on call, we are known to offer a superior support experience to our customers.
Q: Which free and open source software solutions do you use?
OpenSVC v2.1 uses an open source Python interpreter. The next major release will use the Golang open source build toolchain.
Advanced (optional) features of our clusters require some open source tiers products : PowerDNS for cluster backend ip name resolution, Envoy Proxy for the cluster L7 ingress gateway.
As a compagny, OpenSVC also uses a lot of open source softwares to run its business: nextcloud, drbd, rundeck, freeipa, keycloak, ...
Q: What components did you develop yourself?
OpenSVC develops itself all the products it makes available as open source software and supports commercially.
Q: What are the strong points of your technology?
- easy to deploy, and administer
- many drivers available to allow users to make HA solution from the technology they prefer (kvm, virtualbox, docker, podman, lxc, openvz, zfs, lvm, drbd, ...)
- low time to market in DRP ready solutions deployments
- homogeneous management for heterogeneous technologies and applications
- rest api & web gui
- affordable commercial support
Q: Can you name users or clients of your solution? Preferably in the CAC40, DAX30, Fortune500, European governments?
- French Interior Ministry
- Amundi
- BNP Paribas
- Société Générale
- Caisse d'Epargne
- Natixis
- Ericsson-LG
Q: Why did this client choose your solution rather the solution of the market leader or GAFAM?
The first motivation to explore OpenSVC is often the cost. Companies have more and more difficulties to maintain legacy but critical applications, and they find in OpenSVC a suitable solution to migrate the environments. Customers then appreciates the support team expertise level, and also many modern features that the product offers, which leads to new projects starting on OpenSVC.
Q: Tell us about a successful implementation. How did you implement it, why was it a success, where is this implementation today? Plans for the future? How is the relation with the client? Did the client help you get other clients?
A french state departement experienced frequent outages on a critical application serving 100000+ users, despite the application being operated by a commercial and expensive clustering solution. It was decided to find a new clustering provider to improve availabity. The customer was impressed by the proof-of-concept we wrapped in 2 days, where other candidates failed to prove their concept after 1 week (High availability lxc containers accross two datacenters, with synchronous data replication, third site arbitration, ressource capping, and automated deployment).
This customer is now replacing its production legacy clusters with OpenSVC clusters, and all new projects that requires high availability are implemented using our solutions.