Walmart Cloud Native Platform (WCNP) is an interesting case study (though proliferating buzzwords garner the odd chuckle).
Here are some interesting points:
- Abstracts infrastructure differences away, so devs can use various infra types and cloud services with 1 console
- Alternative to pre-built patterns/golden paths which lock devs into specific cloud choices to maintain flexibility and avoid the following tradeoff:
- Opinion vs. abstraction / dev vs. ops tradeoff: Don’t stifle dev’s ability to use the best cloud resources
- Triplet Model cloud strategy https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/blazing-trail-cloud-computing-how-walmart-built-one-/ Microsoft uses Azure and Google Cloud, avoiding AWS as most retailers, combining them with Walmart data centers and edge locations. (Wallmart has 10,000 edge cloud nodes at different facilities https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/blazing-trail-cloud-computing-how-walmart-built-one-/ )
- In practice, they orchestrate a huge number of containers with Kubernetes and an OpenStack private cloud for VM workloads
- Walmart can now make 170,000 edits to its web backend each month, a 1,700X increase over what was possible before these changes were made