How Walmart Is Embracing the Open-Source OpenStack Model

Sean Michael Kerner | eWeek | October 25, 2016

Walmart wasn't always an open-source advocate, but now it's one of the biggest consumers of open-source technology and is actively building a culture that fosters open-source development.

Walmart, the world largest retailer and one the largest employers, aims to give back to the OpenStack community. In a session at the OpenStack Summit here, Andrew Mitry, lead architect for Walmart's OpenStack effort, and Megan Rossetti, part of the OpenStack Operations team at Walmart, detailed how the open-source model is working for the retail giant.

Mitry explained that Walmart started on its OpenStack journey four years ago with a proof of concept (PoC) deployment. That original PoC made use of leftover and idle hardware as an initial test case for Walmart. The PoC was successful and now OpenStack has helped transform the way Walmart works. "Today, 100 percent of our e-commerce runs on OpenStack," Mitry said. "We are now focused on transitioning our retail back-office workloads onto OpenStack, as well."

Mitry noted that now it's not just web applications that Walmart is moving to OpenStack, but a lot of data intensive applications, as well. Today Walmart is running 170,000 computing cores on OpenStack, but perhaps even more noteworthy is the fact that Walmart is not just a consumer of open-source; it is also active contributor with more than 60 open-source projects. Among the open-source projects that Walmart has started are OneOps,an application lifecycle management platform...