Retail giant Walmart has released it OneOps cloud management and application life cycle software on GitHub in a bid to invite improvements from the developer community.
“Walmart is a cloud user, not a cloud provider. It makes sense to release OneOps as an open source project so that the community can improve or build ways for it to adapt to existing technology,” said Jeremy King, CTO of Walmart Global eCommerce in the company’s IT division Walmart Labs.
OneOps can be used to run application on public cloud services such as Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and CenturyLink or to tailor private or hybrid environments using OpenStack. By allowing companies to port their software onto different service providers it gives the buyers of services more bargaining power, since they can change suppliers and enjoy greater flexibility over scale and features. It also frees developers from vendor lock in, as they are not trapped into creating a proprietary system that only works with a particular vendor.
The main benefits of OneOps are described as continuous lifecycle management, cloud portability and greater control of cloud environments. Users of the system said it encourages rapid innovation with safe guards. Software engineers can spin up virtual machines in minutes and start coding without having to spend hours specifying the intricacies of a specific cloud environment.
Walmart has previously released open source software such as Mupd8, which implements the MapUpdate framework, a MapReduce-style framework for processing fast/streaming data. It also released Hapi, a framework for building applications and services, to the open source community. It has also used and contributed to other popular open source projects such as React, Node.js and Openstack.
“After more than two years of development and testing OneOps is available to the open source community,” said King, “We hear from companies of all sizes that they want to spend less time and money on IT, and more time on delivering experiences to customers, faster. Today, that undertaking gets easier.”