Paddy Power Betfair plc, a U.K.-based bookmaking business, was one of two winners who shared the title of OpenStack Superuser at last week’s OpenStack Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. The company built out a DevOps and continuous delivery model for developer, with OpenStack as the middleware.

It migrated 25 percent of production applications onto OpenStack in a year, making more than 100 applications total. Additionally, it grew from 500 deployments a week to more than 1,000 deployments a day using the OpenStack APIs to increase time-to-market, according to Steven Armstrong (pictured), principal DevOps Automation Engineer at Paddy Power Betfair.

“With OpenStack, it’s very flexible, because we’re using it as the middleware for the whole platform,” Armstrong said.

To talk details around how his group runs OpenStack, an open-source software platform for cloud computing, and why it’s important to have Chief Technical Officer buy-in, Armstrong recently spoke to host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during OpenStack Summit. (* Disclosure below.)

Wagering on an OpenStack future

Running a 24×7 betting business across two datacenters, Paddy Power Betfair needs to have the ability to scale up immediately as needed, because if they go down during any sporting event, their customers will go elsewhere to place bets. OpenStack gives them that flexibility and speed, Armstrong explained.

At his company, Armstrong’s group has sponsorship from the CTO on down. As his group is working on technology from the ground up, it’s imperative to have a company that believes in this philosophy and wants to take it forward.

“What we really wanted to do was create a platform that allows our developers to innovate on it and make the best tools for our customers,” Armstrong concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of OpenStack Summit 2017 Boston. (* Disclosure: The OpenStack Foundation sponsored this OpenStack Summit segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither The OpenStack Foundation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE