Case Studies

Case Study: Walmart.com

Challenge

Four years ago, the Walmart Global eCommerce system was a monolithic application, deployed once every 2 months. This represented an unsustainable rate of innovation given the competitive climate. Walmart recognized the need to fundamentally transform technology delivery to compete in the Digital Economy.

Solution

@WalmartLabs was founded in an effort to re-invent how products are designed and delivered within the eCommerce division. A project code named Pangaea paved the way. Walmart’s eCommerce site was re-built following a service oriented architecture, while adopting a DevOps culture, and migrating to cloud based infrastructure. Knowing that providing developers cloud infrastructure alone only reveals the next layer of friction, managing application life cycle, OneOps was acquired early in 2013 and has been under active internal development since.

Results

Today the Walmart eCommerce platform is hosted in some of the largest OpenStack clouds and is managed exclusively via OneOps. On a typical day there are now over 1,000 deployments, executed on-demand by development teams, each taking only minutes on average to complete.

The three necessary ingredients for success were:

A service oriented architecture for the site, without which the complexities of coordinating integration of the monolithic release dominated the schedule.
Localized and empowered ownership of and accountability for each service through building a DevOps culture.
Access to infrastructure at the fingertips of the developers, what they needed, when they needed it. This was accomplished through OneOps application lifecycle management backed by cloud infrastructure, enabling teams to focus on the most valuable aspect of their job – the code.

Jeremy King
CTO & Head of @WalmartLabs

OneOps was pivotal in Walmart’s Global eCommerce technology transformation, where we reinvigorated the culture following the DevOps model, updated the tech stack in line with modern best practices, and adopted cloud based infrastructure. OneOps pulls these dimensions together seamlessly.