Walmart Delivers Every Day Low Prices with OpenStack Cloud Power

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VANCOUVER, British Columbia – OpenStack is supported by the largest technology vendors in the world and, as it turns out, by the world’s largest retailer as well: Walmart. At the OpenStack Summit here, Amandeep Singh Juneja Senior. Director, Cloud Engineering and Operations, WalmartLabs detailed Walmart’s use of open-source cloud technology.

“We’re a retailer and we’re a technology company,” Singh said.

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One of Walmart’s key challenges is to solve the complexity of ecommerce, in the context of the massive organization that is Walmart. Singh noted that Walmart has 11,000 stores in 27 countries and 245 million customers a week that walk through 100 million km of retail space. Singh said that on the ecommerce side, Walmart delivered 1.5 billion page views on Cyber Monday 2014, all powered by OpenStack.

“Combining the complexity of physical scale and digital scale – that’s the complexity of ecommerce 3.0,” Singh said.

The eCommerce 3.0 revolution is about enabling the sale and delivery of any product, any time, anywhere the customer wants that product shipped or delivered. Singh added that Walmart has been in business for over 50 years and over that time has built lots of stacks and layers of technology. With the cloud, Walmart got the opportunity to detangle and create a modular stack..

“At the end of the day, cloud offers the promise that infrastructure is available rapidly and it’s flexible,” Singh said.

In terms of OpenStack, Singh said that Walmart did a bunch of proof of concepts and came across OpenStack. Among the reasons why Walmart chose OpenStack is its flexibility and the ability to meet all of Walmart’s needs. Perhaps even more important, though, for Walmart was the community surrounding OpenStack.

“We liked that OpenStack is rapidly becoming defacto stand for vendors up and down the stack and it’s supported by a large community of individual and enterprise contributors,” Singh said.

walmart, openstack