PayPal’s IT team has taken control of its technology release cycle by shifting key components of its IT infrastructure onto OpenStack. OpenStack is an IT infrastructure framework made up of several components contributed under an open source license by multiple technology providers. OpenStack helps support a ’15 minute rule’ PayPal has set for its developers in an effort to stay ahead of the game.
For PayPal, the decision to use components of OpenStack was based around speed to market. It allows the payments provider to untether its release cycle from those of vendor partners.
‘PayPal has not historically been known for its fast reactions,’ PayPal senior engineer Scott Carlson conceded to attendees at the VMworld conference in San Francisco this week. ‘It has taken us six to nine months sometimes to react to our competitors.’
Carlson said PayPal was continually challenged by nimble payments start-ups, and has responded with a series of measures to make its own processed more agile and innovative, including the adoption of open source cloud platform OpenStack.