OpenStack is a free and open-source software platform for cloud computing, mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), whereby virtual servers and other resources are made available to customers.
On August 2014, Walmart, which is an American multinational retailing corporation that operates as a chain of hypermarkets, made a leap and bet its entire e-commerce operation on OpenStack to the tune of more than 100,000 cores and several petabytes of storage.
Amandeep Singh Juneja, senior director of cloud operations and engineering for Walmart Labs, said "OpenStack met most of our needs, but the beauty of OpenStack was that there was this huge community investment as well as big technology company investments". Also, He added "Second, you can customize it to your needs; you can make changes to it. Third, if there are issues, there's a community out there that will fix it for you".
In the early of adaption, Walmart.com has adopted most components of the Havana version of OpenStack: Nova (compute), Swift (object storage), Cinder (block storage), Neutron (networking), Horizon (dashboard), and Keystone (identity). Walmart actually divides its infrastructure into multiple clouds, said Juneja, and federates those clouds using Keystone.
