Lessons Learned: Walmart CanadaRevitalizing an Aging Architecture for Web Scale

Once upon a time…

Our story

• 45-year-old traditional

retailer

• Competitive market

pressure

• Technical blockers

Challenge

• Modernized architecture

• Delivered mobile first

strategy

• Completed in 12 months

Solution

Our story

Let’s start at the beginning…

Why online?

6

e-commerce

5% of retail sales

e-commerce

20% of retail sales

Expanding a market

7

$100 billion today $400 billion tomorrow?

8

9

Challenge?

10

• Routine crashes

• Complex scalability

• Poor productivity

• Proprietary, closed-

source

Meet the “wall”

11

Cra

sh

es

! S

low

!

$$$$$$

$$$$$$

$$$$$

$ATG + FatWire

Making the introduction

12

meet

It’s time for a new approach.

Java is a first-class citizen of Play and Akka

Leverage your existing

infrastructure and toolset

Play Framework

• Toolkit for building RESTful

APIs on the JVM

• Rails-like developer

productivity with first class

Java and Scala APIs

• Built on Akka for performance,

resilience and scalability on

demand

Apache Spark

• Typesafe offers

developer support for

Apache Spark, an open-

source cluster computing

framework

• Run programs up to 100x

faster than Hadoop

MapReduce in memory

• Write applications quickly

in Java or Scala

Akka

• Lightweight toolkit

for creating

message-driven

applications on the

JVM

• Create loosely

coupled, resilient

and elastic systems

that adapt and scale

to meet the needs of

your business

Typesafe Reactive Platform

Scalable language built for multi-core cloud era,

integrates object-oriented and functional

Enables developers to be more productive while

retaining full interoperability w/ Java

Use Scala, Java, or both

RESTful API endpoints

model tier IO streams persistence

Typesafe Reactive Platform

HTTP

controller tier

React to users

16

Initial Request

HTML

Async

JSON

Web Tier

Recommendation API

• Imagine guaranteed response times.

• How? Progressively enhanced UI, modular

architecture.

React to load

17

• Imagine guaranteed uptime, even during spikes on Black Friday and Boxing Day.

• How? Scaling out, stateless architecture.

React to failure

18

• Imagine protecting back-end heritage systems from cascading failures.

• How? Circuit breakers, Reactive application development.

1 ms 10 ms 3 ms

2 ms 4 ms 15 ms

19

Build your next gen platform with

stay invested in the

PlaySearch & Browse

EndecaAssember API

EndecaData Foundry

AkkaCatalog ETL

EndecaExperience

Manager

EndecaMDEX

ATGCart & Checkout

API

Walmart

Enterprise

Services

(ESB, etc)

Walmart

Enterprise

Services

(ESB, etc)

Walmart

Enterprise

Services

(ESB, etc)

Walmart

Enterprise

Services

(ESB, etc)

Walmart

Enterprise

Services

(ESB, etc)

You don’t need to start from scratch

20

Removing the “wall” from the

“mart”

21

$$$$$

$

$$$$$

$

$$$$$

$

• Conversions up 20%

• Mobile orders up 98%

• No downtime Black Friday

or Boxing Day

Business Uplift

Our story

• Moved off expensive

hardware

• On cheap virtual x86

servers

• 20% - 50% cost savings

• ~ 40% compute cycles

Operational Savings

Our story

Industry Recognition

Our story

Our Customers

Adoption

Online Services

Retail

Education

Technology

Social

Media

Finance