Blazing a trail in cloud computing; how Walmart built one of the largest hybrid clouds in existence

By Suresh Kumar, Executive Vice President, Global Chief Technology Officer and Chief Development Officer, Walmart Inc. 

The past decade has been an incredible time for computing. From the exponential increase in the power of smartphones to the transformational impact of AI, businesses are producing and analyzing more data than ever – creating waves of innovation that are changing all our lives for the better. Such advances have one thing in common: They wouldn’t be possible without cloud computing.  

Just as the ways we use the cloud have evolved to include everything from storing photos we take on our phones to using a virtual desktop at work, how organizations leverage the cloud has evolved, too. We always blaze our own trail at Walmart and that includes building one of the largest hybrid clouds in existence. This afternoon at the Collision conference in Toronto, I shared the latest big milestone in our modern cloud journey: the rollout of our regional triplet clouds in the United States.  

Our Modern Cloud Platform 

This “Triplet Model,” as we call it, is innovative and powerful, both by design and deployment. By pairing public clouds with our Walmart Private Clouds via a regional cloud model across the U.S. (West, Central and East), we’re enabling 10,000 edge cloud nodes at our facilities and bringing computational power and data closer to our customers and associates.   

Positioning workloads in the right places helps us drive increased application performance and low latency across the board. In addition, the Triplet Model offers increased capacity allowing us to better react to moments of peak consumer demand, such as the holiday shopping season or a great price on an in-demand gaming console. This infrastructure offers us incredible resiliency and disaster recovery capabilities while reducing cloud cost by 10-18% annually to support our everyday low prices. 

Bringing public, private and edge clouds together in this regional approach, gives us the scale, flexibility, end-to-end visibility and runway necessary to innovate for our customers and internal teams long into the future.  

For example, through our Walmart Cloud Platform, we can make 170,000 adjustments to our website backend every month, a 1,700X increase over what we were capable of previously. This means we can launch new experiences such as the ability to schedule a vaccine appointment at thousands of Walmart pharmacies faster and more seamlessly than ever.   

Custom Built by Walmart Technologists for Massive Scale 

Today, with over 1 million CPU cores, Walmart Global Tech is running one of the largest OpenStack Private Clouds in the world. We also lean on services from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. 

Our Triplet Model is powered by three pieces of custom-built infrastructure that enable us to smoothly switch applications across public and private clouds:  

1. Traffic Management, which enables intelligent routing; 
2. OneOps, our open-source cloud management platform; and  
3. Walmart Cloud Native Platform (WCNP), a cloud “abstraction” layer.  

These help our engineers save a lot of time. Walmart Cloud Native Platform, an industry-first capability that we built in 2020, runs 545 thousand pods on more than 93 thousand nodes! 

New Cloud-Powered Experiences and Runway for the Future 

Walmart’s cloud investments fuel our ability to adopt and implement emerging technologies. Today we announced two AR features that enable you to view digital furniture with your actual home space as the backdrop or to scan a store shelf with the Walmart app and see product details based on your dietary preferences.  

Creating these experiences on a mobile device in the palm of your hand requires powerful cloud computing and a team of technologists who envision and build the architecture that makes all this possible. Our technologists are building not just the future of Walmart, but the future of retail itself.  

If you’re interested in joining our team, explore our open opportunities.