Walmart has bequeathed what could be a valuable gift to enterprises by making its OneOps platform for cloud and application lifecycle management available as open source software under the Apache 2.0 license. OneOps can make cloud lock-in a thing of the past for customers, the company said in a blog post on the announcement:
OneOps has four main benefits:
1) Cloud portability enables developers to seamlessly move applications, databases or entire cloud environments from one cloud provider to another. They’re able to “cloud shop” and take advantage of better technology or lower costs;
2) Continuous lifecycle management of the application means once a developer launches an application, OneOps continuously “auto-pilots” the app, scaling and repairing the app when unforeseen changes occur;
3) Faster innovation empowers engineers to spin up a new environment to host their app in a matter of minutes, without having to spend hours specifying the intricacies of a specific cloud environment. OneOps models all of that for them; and
4) Greater abstraction of cloud environments puts the control back into the hands of developers, instead of cloud providers, who often dictate the proprietary APIs, architecture, tools and technologies developers have to use.
We’re enabling any organization to achieve the same cloud portability and developer benefits that Walmart has enjoyed. And by eliminating the barriers that cloud hosting providers have erected, OneOps will drive them to compete based on price, customer service and innovation. It’s a winning scenario for all dev-centric organizations.
Analysis: OneOps Is One for Enterprises to Watch
As with any open source project, Walmart itself stands to benefit from additional development resources and community contributions back to the code, but OneOps is already fairly mature—not to mention apparently capable of handling the cloud management needs of the world's largest employer. Although Walmart's announcement described OneOps as a homegrown solution, it got a head start by acquiring a startup of the same name in 2013.
Meanwhile, some coverage of the OneOps announcement framed Walmart's move as a strike against rival Amazon, with the argument being OneOps could help customers move workloads more easily away from Amazon Web Services.
While that connection seems a bit tenuous, the open-source availability of a platform like OneOps should certainly be welcome to companies keen on making the most of the ongoing price war in IaaS.
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