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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.
..To make sure this wasn't an April Fools' Joke!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
That point holds true for Wal-Mart, but since Amazon has always been 100% Internet based (and especially after they started making Kindles) they do count as a tech company. Not saying you should trust their cloud, though.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
Amazon is a tech company, Walmart isn't. I guess somewhere at Walmart HQ there has been a conversation like that:
A) Damn! Our sales are dropping! Which company has taken our customers?
B) I've heard of Amazon to be successful. Its an internet retail store.
A) Can we buy some "Internet" for us too?
B) Internet isn't bought, its a network for communication.
A) Either way, can we roll it out?
B) We could, but Amazon has a major head start and has much more experience in that field
B) Also, they largely benefit from synergies from their cloud services.
A) We have to get that experience too. And we must get those synergies!
A) We must become better than them, and win them on their own game! We are longer in the business than those computer-kids!
B) Ok, boss.
It's ok, don't both reading the article or even the summary. Just have a schizophrenic interpret the summary for you and then post your comment.
Walmart has enough money they can just do it like Microsoft does. Keep throwing money at it. Piles of cash have always made up for innovation and experience.
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.
Of course you just didn't see their earnings report and negative outlook.
wal mart has been doing tech before there was an amazon. just not consumer side tech. they pioneered RFID back in the 90's
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.
I suspect the piles of cash thing isn't really what's going on. Walmart has a huge revenue stream, but they're not known for pissing away cash. This probably has more to do with helping other companies "liberate" themselves from lock in from a single cloud provider (cough...AWS...cough) without having to pony up for something like cloud foundry. Looking forward to seeing the code.
Dude, go back to the cows.
Walmart is first and foremost a tech company . Their computerized logistics chain is the essential technology that enables them to be a multinational behemoth rather than a typical regional discount store chain. This has been true for decades.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Fail.
Walmart is a tech company that happens to sell (a lot of) stuff. Walmart Information Systems Division is 3000+ people, including some highly trained developers, network and systems engineers, and information security specialists.
It is one of the best tech firms I have worked for in my 35yr tech career. Don't believe me? Spend a week in Bentonville, AR (and another week in San Bruno, CA) and talk to some tech folks.
When I worked at Sam's I noticed that a lot of the applications we used were made in-house. I'm surprised they actually released something so publicly.
Walmart is doing something like $300,000,000,000 per year in sales now, yet I can buy something at a Walmart store, immediately go to a different store for a return and when they scan my receipt the order comes up immediately. All the while about $9500/second in transactions is being dumped into their database.
Yes, they are a technology company.
Amazon isn't as big but they're still doing amazing stuff, also a technology company.
Do you have ESP?
In cloud lingo, an "instance" means a "virtual private server", a VM running on someone else's computer.
I wonder if their IT staff get locked into the datacenters at night.
"Looking forward to seeing the code" - I remember when a lot of people said that about SAPdb, now called MaxDB.
And then they did.......some of them got their brains fried and have never recovered.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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..
THIS!! a thousand times. People have no clue how tightly controlled their logistics chain is and believe it or not they have some very high tech built in-house to get that beast to be as efficient as it is.
Playboy's virgin effort, SmutCloud, dispersed rapidly in the jet stream.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
Walmart went digital in the 1970s. Cash registers on a LAN to the mini in the back. The mini on a WAN to HQ. HQ getting complete register transaction histories from all stores every 15 min. Massive data mining to optimize store inventories for local preferences. Automated store ordering of products from a distribution center (DC), automated DC ordering of products from manufacturers (or transfer from another DC with excess inventory). Walmart pioneered this stuff. Its part of how they crushed the competition.
Walmart is the biggest employer of H1B visa workers year after year.
Foreign workers are not locked in a store, but they are locked in terrible work conditions, low-end housing and basically economic slavery. Meanwhile Walmart is getting in the cloud business to allegedly help customers avoid vendor "lock-in". The audacity of those people.
lucm, indeed.
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!
and everything gets real sticky, and then, while there's no vendor lock-in, no other cloud provider will touch it.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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!
Exactly. Just because their stores are dingy and full of ugly people the hipsters assume they can't possibly be technically sophisticated behind the scenes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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?"
Amazon was an expert of getting the widget to my door without me leaving my couch.
My time isn't free. Add up the time and fuel it takes to drive to Walmart the time it takes to shop Walmart and the time it takes sometimes just to check out. It's cheaper for me to have Amazon deliver a box of toilet paper exactly when I need it than to remember (and forget) to get some at Walmart.
Amazon's figured out the 'last mile' to the customer. Walmart still puts that on me to get it from the end of their supply chain. Amazon makes sure it gets to my door.
I'm waiting for someone to release reusable shipping containers. I should be able to schedule deliveries of products to my house not stand in line in my 'free time'.
Cloudy with a chance for meatballs.... ewwww....
-Unresolved symbol? Byte me!
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.
If you didn't already know it, Walmart is planning to launch an Amazon Prime competitor: http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
I don't think Jeff Bezos is good to his workers and I know the Walton family makes its money by grinding its rank and file employees into powder. So there are no heroes here. I think the fact that they're competing is good, I don't want to see either one establish a monopoly.
OK, so they are super-efficient, so they should be able to pay their workers a living wage, right? Right? They can shove their efficiency in the Waltons' butts, as far as I care. It's an enterprise set up for the benefit of the sociopathic owners. It's a public company in name only.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
And yet when I go to pickup something at site to store, their software still sucks, noone can use it, it lists everything we've ever ordered instead of just what is there to be picked up, and noone can find our order.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
No! Their workers can go get a fucking education and get a job that pays them a living wage just like I did. When i first came to this country I worked 3 jobs (BK in the afternoons at 3.65/hr, back when minimum wage was 3.25/hr, McD's opening in the morning at 4.25/hr, and washing cars on the weekend) and put myself through school at night while working those 3 jobs because I made the determination at that time that I wasn't going to come all the way to America to be making anywhere near minimum wage when i'm 40
"No! Their workers can go get a fucking education and get a job that pays them a living wage just like I did."
Yep, you tell that to the friends I have whom have Masters degrees in hard sciences yet can't get any fucking work at all EXCEPT at fast food places.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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?
All of them? Get off your high chair.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I don't think i'm that special. If I can do so can they.
WalMart and Amazon are fucking retail stores, not tech companies. I'm not trusting them or their "clouds" with my data.
I am the security sup. for Amazon in Brazil. Actually Amazon has a much broader operation than it appears to the outside eyes. Amazon has a huge tech infra structure and an amazing security system for all information kept in its hd and ssds. I think Wall Mart will have to develop light years to reach the standards applied in the AWS. Experience counts a lot.