UPDATED 11:54 EDT / OCTOBER 15 2015

NEWS

Walmart open-sources its internal PaaS to stick it to Amazon

The competition between the world’s two largest retailers leaked into the public cloud this week after the announcement that Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is releasing the source code for the proprietary platform-as-a-service stack powering its e-commerce operations under a free license. The move should make quite a few providers stir in their seats, but it’s only targeting one in particular.

The public cloud that Amazon Inc. developed to support its own online sales started the shift to on-demand infrastructure consumption in 2006 and has enjoyed dominance ever since thanks to a steady stream of new features and price cuts. But for all the enhancements that the retail giant made over the years, one early limitation still persists: the difficulty of moving workloads off its platform.

That’s the Achilles heel WalMart hopes to exploit with OneOps, which is based on software gained through its acquisition of the startup of the same name two years and a half years ago. Jeremy King, the chief technology officer of the retail giant’s sprawling engineering division, claimed in an official post that the framework allows for “seamless” migration of workloads among public clouds.

If that interoperability works as advertised, then OneOps should make it much easier for Amazon customers to take advantage of services from rivaling providers such as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. that they wouldn’t have been able to exploit otherwise. Organizations thus gain the ability to employ the best of each public cloud instead of consuming everything from the same source, which holds the potential to cut off some of the revenue fueling Jeff Bezos’ retail juggernaut.

But it’s doubtful whether the release of OneOps will have a tangible effect on Amazon’s top line in the foreseeable future. For starters, the code is only due to become available in November. And more importantly, adapting a new platform-as-a-service framework is not exactly a trivial undertaking for a large and slow moving enterprise with upwards of dozens of workloads running off-premise.

As a result, production implementations of Cloud Foundry, today’s leading open-source PaaS stack, still remain limited in number several years after its release. That’s despite a broad ecosystem of supporters that WalMart will have to spend a lot of time and resources matching for OneOps to even starting making a noticeable impact.

But the framework does boast one major advantage that Cloud Foundry didn’t have at the outset: Proven production-readiness. Walmart claims that nearly 3,000 of its developers rely on the internal implementation of OneOps to push some 30,000 code changes every month, which should address the maturity concerns of even the largest organizations. How many will end up joining the bandwagon, however, still remains to be seen.

Image via Walmart Labs

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