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Walmart Open Sources Its Cloud Platform To Take On Amazon (walmartlabs.com)
Mickeycaskill writes: Walmart is effectively open sourcing its OneOps cloud platform, with the source code set to be uploaded to GitHub at the end of 2015. By making the cloud platform open source, Walmart is taking the fight to Amazon Web Services by giving developers a chance to avoid vendor lock-in. Walmart argues that OneOps has four main advantages: cloud portability, continuous lifecycle management, faster innovation, and great abstraction of cloud environments. The company says that the move should increase competition between cloud service vendors. "We're enabling any organization to achieve the same cloud portability and developer benefits that Walmart has enjoyed,"said Jeremy King, CTO of Walmart Global eCommerce and head of WalmartLabs.
lower prices.
WalMart and Amazon are fucking retail stores, not tech companies.
I'm not trusting them or their "clouds" with my data.
..To make sure this wasn't an April Fools' Joke!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... getting cloud busted https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Forgive me for being ignorant, but if I download this 'Cloud platform', precisely what can I do with it?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Ala Netflix, Twitter, etc.. But it probably won't be popular. So in general it's good but in particular more of a meh.
Walmart can't even do online retail very well.. now they are just going to throw some code into the wind and expect it to result in competition for AWS? Yea... good luck with that one!
Walmart and Walmart.com are probably starting to have problems making a decent profit margin on some products because Amazon.com is undercutting them on price. Amazon can do this because they don't have a giant store network with hundreds of thousands of employees to support, and they have a separate giant cloud hosting business to draw revenue from. They are also working on crazy new instant shipping options like bike and drone delivery that threaten Walmart's Brick and Mortar operations.
Walmart's solution? Try to put a dent in Amazon's hosting business by offering an open source cloud hosting option! If it's successful, you just forced Amazon to offer cheaper cloud hosting to fend off the new competition. Amazon now has less revenue for new R&D, which hopefully keeps them from further expanding into other product offerings that compete with Walmart.
If it works, it's a genius move. I'm not sure if they have the technical clout to pull it off, though. I guess that we'll have to wait for the code dump to GitHub to see.
Everyone knows the top tech talent is in Bentonville, Ark.
I mean, you're recruited up and down the west coast and New York City. The choice is clearly Bentonville.
In cloud lingo, an "instance" means a "virtual private server", a VM running on someone else's computer.
I used to deal with Wallmart as a supplier.. Their order management system and accounts is very inefficient. My deliveries routinely get lost in their system and my payments are missed with no proper way to track them.. I have stopped doing business with them as they refuse to acknowledge that I have made certain deliveries for which I have not received payment. Their stores are sometime unable to generate GRN due to system inefficiencies.. I don't trust their IT systems at all..
The were able to nuke the competition back in the 1990s by being able to computerize and minimize expenses in the entire distribution system, including "just in time" inventory which allowed them to severely undercut all competitors in pricing by using science, statistics and analytics --- being able calibrate their entire supply chain.
WalMart and Amazon are fucking retail stores, not tech companies. I'm not trusting them or their "clouds" with my data.
Actually Walmart is a tech company, a pioneer in the field. Technical innovation had much to do with their success. They went digital in the 1970s, automated inventory tracking, electronic purchase orders and payments, data mining on sales, etc. All cash registers were reporting sales to a minicomputer in the back, every fifteen minutes the minicomputer sent the data to headquarters. Headquarters had near real time visibility on product sales and could view this data at various levels from national to regional to state to city to individual stores.
This incredible near real time data is how they got huge multinational corporations to agree to buy into the Walmart digital supply chain, they offered them access to this near real time data for their corporation's products.
They did extensive data mining. Using the behaviors observed to balance inventory between regional distribution centers. Again, automated. Hurricane forecasted for Florida and/or the Gulf. Shipping orders are automatically generated moving pop tarts from mid west distribution centers to Florida and Gulf distribution centers. Their data mining noticed a spike in pop tart sales, among other things, when hurricanes are forecast.
Walmart computerized their inventory, supply chain, ordering and payments back in the 1970s. This includes automation, inventory at a store gets to a certain level and a shipment order is automatically generated to resupply from a distribution center. Distribution center gets to a certain level and excess is transferred from other distribution centers or a digital purchase order gets sent to the product's manufacturer.
Cash registers were networked to the minicomputer in the store, reporting all transactions. Stores were networked to HQ via satellite and reported sales every 15 minutes. HQ did massive data mining at national, regional, state and local levels. Optimizing store inventory for local tastes. Again, 1970s.
Their data mining was such that recognized patterns were added to the automated supply chain management. For example when hurricanes are forecast pop tart sales spike in florida and the gulf. Their software monitors weather reports and when hurricanes are forecast they automatically ship pop tarts from midwest distribution centers to florida and the gulf.
Amazon followed where Walmart pioneered. Don't be so sure Walmart can not pose a serious threat with respect to logistics and supply chain management.
I personally believe this is a good thing. Walmart is #1 on the Fortune 500 list so they must be doing something right. Amazon.com is #29 on the same list BTW.
Having worked in the ERP/Logistics space myself, you don't get to be as big as Walmart without some serious tech in place and working.
If anything, maybe having more players in this space is good just for the competitive aspect; it will force others to lower their prices to lure customers!
Yup, for many years the Walmart data warehouse was the largest in the world. They were the first to hit 1TB (in 1992!), 10TB, 100TB, and 1PB.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'm expecting a few cans of baked beans or sweet corn, if I spend a certain amount on storage and VMs each month.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Walmart runs OpenStack (as can be seen here: https://www.openstack.org/summ... ). It will be interesting what they want to open source, maybe they have built a management layer on top of OpenStack or even their own "distribution".
"Is it friday yet?"
Walmart isn't selling cloud services, it's making the code it uses to run its own internal cloud as open source. It's a three way win for Walmart:
1. Good publicity (we all hate Walmart).
2. They can use community contributions to their code to make their own internal cloud better.
3. Some other Amazon Web Services customers might use Walmart's code to run their own internal cloud instead of using AWS. That might hurt Amazon profits - in a small way, of course - without costing Walmart anything.
Further, Amazon has always been a tech company. Amazon Web Services was originally built for the company's internal use:
1. Automatically creating, configuring, and adding virtual machines to the amazon.com site when demand spiked around holidays or the release of a hot product. Then automatically shutting off virtual machines and physical servers as demand dropped to save on power and cooling.
2. Adding redundancy between datacenters, so that a natural disaster or connection failure at one Amazon datacenter didn't interrupt services to customers.
3. Providing the distributed redundant storage and data streaming to support their streaming video service.
I don't trust any public cloud with my private data, no matter what company owns it. But in terms of public cloud expertise, Amazon is every bit as good as Google, Microsoft, Rackspace, or any other major player in the cloud space.
TFS is written like this is the first open source attack on AWS. Can someone explain why this is any different from OpenStack from Rackspace?