Why Disney Interactive dug into a few open-source toolboxes for its cloud

SAN FRANCISCO — Disney Interactive wanted more privacy than what would’ve been possible through a public cloud, and thus it went down the private route. But instead of going with one vendor or open-source environment, the video game division of the Walt Disney Co. created a solution stitching together some OpenStack and some Cloudstack, said Peter Lopez, Disney Interactive’s system architect, at CloudBeat 2013 today.

Disney Interactive comprises a portfolio of game studios it has gradually acquired, Lopez said. So its cloud must be hybrid, but not in the sense of incorporating shared infrastructure from vendors such as Amazon Web Services as well as on-premise gear. Rather, it needs to support applications built in multiple environments. In other words, a studio with applications running on OpenStack and another with Cloudstack programs can both easily port over to the Disney Interactive cloud.