Amazon's biggest money-maker might not ultimately be its colossal e-commerce business but its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services. Hundreds of thousands of companies, including rivals like Netflix, rely on Amazon to host and support their information technology infrastructure. Now Walmart hopes to help these companies break their dependence on Amazon.
No, Walmart isn't getting into the cloud computing business to compete with its retail rival. But it has open sourced OneOps, a cloud management tool the company uses internally to run the infrastructure that underpins its e-commerce sites. Now any company will be able to use Walmart's software to create, manage, and migrate applications across multiple cloud computing infrastructures, including Amazon, Microsoft's Azure, and Rackspace. The point here isn't to hobble Amazon's cloud business. In fact, it could make it easier for some companies to use Amazon Web Services, since it will be easier to migrate applications between their own data centers and Amazon's cloud—and they'll have to worry less about getting locked in to Amazon's services.
This fear of being locked in is what drove Walmart to acquire OneOps back in 2013, says Jeremy King, the CTO of Walmart Labs, the division of the company that handles software engineering for all of Walmart's brands.
King joined Walmart in 2011 with the mandate of modernizing the infrastructure that ran the company's e-commerce efforts. "We realized the old tech stack wasn't going to cut it," he says. "It was all five years from being end of life. So we needed to do cloud."
King and his team decided to focus entirely on open source software, so the company wouldn't be beholden to any one software vendor for the foreseeable future. They standardized on OpenStack, a tool that helps developers create their own Amazon-style clouds, and started acquiring companies, including OneOps, in order to bring experienced open source developers into Walmart.
Now,by open sourcing OneOps, Walmart can work with the larger opens ource community to expand the tool's functionality and support even more technologies, making it possible manage whatever new software the company wants to adopt in the future.
