Growens operates worldwide with over 25,500 customers in more than 115 countries. It generates technologies for predictive marketing, messaging, and content creation meant for organizations wishing to communicate effectively with their customers. We are based in the thriving city of 🇮🇹 Milan, with business units in the USA, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Spain.

The Growens Group is currently composed of 5 business units, operating in complementary sectors and markets within the landscape of cloud marketing technologies (MailUp, Agile Telecom, Acumbamail, BEE, and Datatrics).

We have been using OpenNebula since version 5.8 “Edge”. We were looking for a solution that allowed our DevOps department to create virtual machines when needed, thus offering an approach similar to the Public Cloud but leveraging our on-premise infrastructure. We needed a solution able to manage Templates, Virtual Networks, Security Groups, Golden Images, etc.

In OpenNebula, we found the perfect tool because it allows administrators precise control of every aspect, and therefore it allows end-users to navigate in a tailor-made environment: every parameter can be calibrated, every option can be allowed, or denied on a case-by-case basis.

The simplicity of installing OpenNebula and having our own Private Cloud up and running was a very welcome aspect: creating Ansible playbooks to deploy new nodes was also very simple and fast.

Our setup is relatively simple: in our case, we don’t need OpenNebula to support a high availability configuration because we use upstream balancers and the applications are always stateless.

When in late 2020 a server rebooted at night and the virtual machines were left off, we quickly came up with a way for OpenNebula to reboot the VMs by itself. We then documented the solution in an article on Medium and shared it with the Community.

We are now in the process of migrating to the latest version, OpenNebula 6.2 “Red Square”, so looking forward to starting to make use of all the amazing features in this new release! 🚀