Two Walmart associates who spoke recently at the Linux Foundation’s Leadership Summit provided some updates on the retailer’s efforts to automate its business.
According to Andrew Mitry, a distinguished engineer, Cloud, and Megan Rossetti, a senior engineer, Cloud, the company is expanding its cloud services to encompass more than its e-commerce business. And it’s streamlined its cloud services and DevOps teams into one group for the whole company.
In addition, Mitry said, “We’ve embraced the open source culture. We’ve also formed an official internal open source team, making it easier for everybody to contribute and for us to track those contributions.”
Some of Walmart’s open source challenges are familiar, such as working across time zones. “Just realize you’re not going to find times that will work for everyone,” said Rossetti. “We have found a lot of online tools, trying to get as real-time as possible.”
In July 2016, Walmart started an OpenStack project around OneOps, the company’s DevOps software that makes it easier to move applications from one cloud to another. At the Linux conference it put some numbers to its OneOps progress, saying it now has 213,000 cores on OpenStack.
Walmart says it’s become one of the world’s largest users of Puppet. In 2013, it chose Open Source Puppet 3 to start automating its server-build processes with the eventual hope of bringing automation to its entire distributed compute environment, including servers in its corporate data centers and public clouds, as well as in its distribution centers and stores.
By October 2016, the company had scaled to 55,000-plus nodes on Puppet.
Also in October 2016, Walmart announced the open source release of its Electrode application platform, which powers Walmart.com.