Amongst all the talk about the death of OpenStack, the evolution of the platform has kept it as a major player in tech. John Furrier, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, talked with Subbu Allamaraju, chief engineer for eBay, Inc.’s Cloud and Platforms departments, to find out what he thinks about the future of the cloud.

OpenStack progress and adoption

“When we started OpenStack in 2012, we were not really sure what it was to run OpenStack at scale,” explained Allamaraju. “We invested heavily … in a lot of automation. All of our engineers were great programmers, and they spent a lot of time in figuring out how to automate in an OpenStack climate.” The result is one of the largest OpenStack deployments in the world.

“Of course, there were pain points along the way, because we were learning what it takes,” he added. “Every upgrade was a lesson, how to do it better, how to do it better next time.”

Advice for OpenStack

Allamaraju has been through the trenches with OpenStack and has made it work within the large-scale eBay needs. For anyone looking at using OpenStack, he offered the following: “My advice is very simple. Treat it as its own software problem; don’t treat it as an IT problem.”

Get more key information from this experienced and successful engineer by watching the entire interview below. And be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenStack Day Seattle.

Photo by SilicanANGLE