Walmart Open Sources OneOps Cloud Application Management Platform

Walmart became the latest major business to embrace the open source cloud this week with the release on GitHub of OneOps, the company’s formerly closed source cloud management and application lifecycle platform.

OneOps is a platform for building and launching cloud-based applications across varied and changing environments. It offers a way to deploy apps on different providers’ platforms, from Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and CenturyLink public clouds to private or hybrid environments built using OpenStack.

The main selling point of OneOps for businesses is that it lets organizations switch between different providers easily to take advantage of changes in pricing, features and scalability. Meanwhile, for developers, it makes it easier to build and deploy cloud apps in a vendor-agnostic way.

Walmart says it chose to open source OneOps in order to gain contributions from the open source community as the platform continues to develop.

“Why open source? Walmart is a cloud user, not a cloud provider,” the company said in a statement. “It makes sense for Walmart to release OneOps as an open source project so that the community can improve or build ways for it to adapt to existing technology.”

Walmart added that it has already contributed other code to the open source world. “We are no stranger to open source. We’ve been an active contributor, releasing technologies such as Mupd8 and hapi with the community. We’ve loved using and contributing to other popular open source projects like React, Node.js and Openstack.”

These days, the decision by major companies to open source their code is becoming a dog-bites-man story. It has become so common that it is no longer remarkable. The bigger story here is OneOps’s availability as a new tool for the open source cloud community as developers work to make and keep their applications compatible with the growing and ever-changing array of cloud providers.