Case Study: Workday achieves a scalable, automated private cloud and faster SaaS delivery with OpenStack

Workday - Customer Case Study

Workday, a leading SaaS provider for finance and HR, faced rapidly growing customer demand and capacity limits from a one-to-one mapping of customers to servers. The company needed to avoid vendor lock-in, maximize resource utilization, standardize delivery across VMs, containers and bare metal, and automate repeatable operations across global data centers to accelerate innovation and scale without simply adding hardware.

Workday implemented a private cloud based on OpenStack, deployed across multiple regions in phased migrations (Icehouse to Mitaka) with KVM, MariaDB/Galera, Ceph and an automated CI/CD pipeline (Gerrit, Jenkins, Chef). The shift consolidated five deployment systems into one, increased nodes-per-operator dramatically (from ~500:1 to ~10,000:1), enabled 1,000+ workload instances/day, improved VMs-per-host and resource efficiency, cut testing costs, and delivered roughly a 90% faster speed-to-market for new applications.

Workday