WeChat maker Tencent wins the OpenStack Superuser Award and joins the OpenStack Foundation as a Gold Member.

“We have maxed out the OpenStack Foundation memberships, but Tencent brings in a unique use case that will benefit the OpenStack community” – Alan Clark, Chairman of the OpenStack Foundation.

Despite critics claiming otherwise, OpenStack is growing at an incredible rate. At the OpenStack Summit in Sydney Australia, we see a vibrant and growing community that’s consuming OpenStack in so many different ways that it amazes any industry observer. It’s being used all the way from the smaller Smartme.io project to the massive WeChat platform that serves billions of users.

At the first day of the summit Tencent team (the parent company of WeChat) delivered a keynote speech in which they talked about how they are consuming OpenStack to cut cost and scale their infrastructure. Their work around OpenStack bagged them this summit’s Superuser Award.

Some of the key factors that contributed to Tencent’s success with OpenStack include:

• Cuts server costs by 30 percent and O&M costs by 55 percent, saving the company more than RMB100 million each year.
• Shortens resource delivery from two weeks to 0.5 hours
• Optimizes global resource scheduling; for example, the deployment duration of the global mail system has been cut from 10 days to 1 day.
• Supports the development teams of the services that generate tens of billions of revenues for Tencent annually.

Commenting on the work that TenCent has done, Mark Collier, CTO of the OpenStack Foundation said, “This is an amazing story. There are more than 900 million users on WeChat and it’s light years ahead of other chat platforms in other countries. And it runs on OpenStack.”

Tencent has also been accepted as a Gold Member of the OpenStack Foundation. Gold members contribute .025% of their annual revenue to the OpenStack Foundation which is capped at $200,000.  This contribution funds the development of the platform.

“Tencent is committed to the cloud computing market, and OpenStack is an integral component of our strategy to build a complete hybrid cloud service ecosystem for the global market,” said Bowyer Liu, Tencent’s chief architect of TStack Cloud. “Tencent hopes to grow with OpenStack, make valuable contributions to the community, and bring prosperity to the OpenStack ecosystem.”

The foundation now has 8 platinum and 24 Gold members. According to Clark, fiscally, the foundation is in a very healthy state and it will be investing in new areas to help users.

Tencent has been using OpenStack for its TStack private cloud platform since 2013. TStack was created by the company to provide services for internal internal IT and testing environments for the company’s services such as QQ, WeChat and Game.

Today, TStack is also the cloud computing platform Tencent uses to achieve its “internet plus” strategy of providing complete hybrid cloud services for government and enterprises in China.

Currently, TStack is deployed on more than 6,000 nodes in 14 clusters across seven data centers in multiple provinces in China, supporting the Sichuan, Guangdong, Xiamen and Yunnan government clouds.  TStack has been running in production for four years with availability over 99.99 percent and today serves more than 100 million users.