Uber backs hybrid cloud as route to business and geographical expansion
Uber’s head of compute Dean Nelson has revealed how the firm is pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy to ensure its infrastructure has capacity to cope with its expanding business interests.
In the eight or so years Uber has been going, its app-based taxi-hailing service has rolled out to 600 cities worldwide, with its platform helping more than three million drivers around the world find fares, and 15 million customers a day get to where they want to go.
“We ignite opportunity by setting the world in motion. Everything is about moving something from A to B: it doesn’t matter if it is a package, a person or food. Anytime we need to move something, we want to be in the middle of that transaction,” said Nelson, during a keynote at the Datacenter Dynamics DCD>London conference in Old Billingsgate.
The company has also expanded into food delivery with Uber Eats, and is plotting a move into freight, drone-mediated food deliveries, healthcare services and aviation, with the first trials of its Uber Air taxi service set to begin in Dallas, Los Angeles and Paris in 2021.
“The key [to remember] is we’re just getting started. It just blows my mind every day when I go to work, and I keep hearing about the new features we’re adding onto the platform, the new businesses we’re going into, but globally this is changing the way things work,” said Nelson.
As the range of services Uber has to offer continues to rise, so too does the amount of load its IT infrastructure has to handle. “They [the services] all require a transaction on our platform,” said Nelson.
To achieve this scale, Uber relies on a hybrid IT infrastructure setup, he said, which he refers to as its Tripod Strategy that combines the use of public cloud services with standardised on-premise server racks in its colocation facilities, all separately handling compute, storage, database and GPU workloads.
“The reason for that is, when you get to scale, you have volumes that you can get price/performance that rivals cloud, but it is extremely difficult to [get the] ability to move like a cloud by yourself,” he said.
“You need the ability to turn up for GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] and data sovereignty in Europe tomorrow, so we have multiple cloud providers, and we also have on-premise to help us keep balance.”
The on-premise portion of the infrastructure is a reference architecture Nelson terms Uber Metal, which provides the “building blocks” the company needs to achieve the scale to not only expand the range of industries Uber crosses into, but also its geographical spread.
“What is Uber Metal? It is the infrastructure that runs our on-premise metal as a service,” he said, which is designed to run out of its colocation facilities.
The aforementioned server racks are all organised into identical, standardised pods, containing 16 racks consisting of decreasing quantities of storage, database capacity, compute power and GPU processing capabilities, that are all hooked up to a 600G uplink.
“We have 16 racks that make up a pod. Then we take that one step further [to create a zone containing] 30 pods with 16 racks, which gives you reference architecture of 480 cabinets of usable IT capacity,” he said.
There are also some additional racks added to each one, bringing the total up to 576, to effectively act as a capacity buffer.
The idea being these datacentre zones will be dotted around the globe, for failover and latency reasons, while ensuring Uber works to ensure it has the IT capacity it needed to run its services all around the world.
The reason the firm is being so open about its Uber Metal vision, added Nelson, is because it is still under development and wants the industry’s help in refining it.
“I’m walking you through our reference architecture and the reason for that is I really want you guys to understand what it is we’re trying to build, because it takes all of us to get there and we need your help,” he added.
source computerweekly
Industry Data Centre News
Latest Jobs
-
- Outside IR 35 contract- Threat & vulnerability analyst - SC CLEARED UK REMOTE
- N/A
- £550
-
6 month rolling contract Outside IR35- immediate start. Threat and Vulnerability Analyst. Tenable.sc experience needed. The ability to deploy agent, configure environments, run active and passive scans, produce reports and prioritise remediation activities based on output Current and ACTIVE clearance is required
-
- Chief Information Security Officer- CISO. London
- London
- N/A
-
Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is needed to join a senior leadership team that is driving change across a London based FTSE business. You will have responsibility and accountability to define and execute an information & Cyber Security strategy. To be successful you should have the following experience; Experience defining, presenting and executing against your information AND cyber security strategy. Experience delivering / managing functions across information security GRC / Audit and technical Cyber Security capabilities. Senior stakeholder management to the executive committee. Embedding Info / cyber security within a Cloud focused environment. Further develop, expand and mature the information / cyber security function | team. Be able to regularly commute to London Financial services experience is desirable. If this sounds like an opportunity you are interested in then please use the below form to schedule a call. This is an exclusive project to DCL Search. All conversations are kept in confidence.
-
- IAM Business Analyst- ForgeRock
- European Union
- £500 per day
-
IAM Business Analyst with ForgeRock experience is need for a 12 months contract The client is in the middle of a large scale ForgeRock deployment and the BA will sit between the technical teams and the business helping to ensure the project is a success You will need to be a strong business communicator and have experience of mapping business needs against ForgeRock features This will be a remote project dealing with teams in different geographies, you must have strong English communications skills and be happy working remotely and able to be proactive to ensure your side of the project is a success
-
- Java Developer
- United Kingdom
- upto £55,000 plus good benefits
-
Home based opportunity for an experinced Java Developer to become involved in a number of large scale national IAM projects Duties include · Development and maintenance of source code for our customers IAM deployments · Have a good understanding of testing frameworks and methodologies and are able to test solutions within you own work and others · Ability to create clean code according to good coding standards · Create easy to follow documentation You don' need to have experience within the Identity Access Management space but it would be beneficial we are looking for people with · Java experienced ideally Java 11 · preferably experience in some of the following: Maven, Gradle, PHP, Lua scripting, C#, Spring Boot/Spring, OGNL, or Groovy · experience of working with one or more of: creating/consuming REST APIs LDAP SQL encryption Identity Protocols (SAML, OAuth, OIDC, SCIM etc) · good knowledge of development methodologies with regards to the end user experience For more details please send your CV and we will come back to you