WalmartLabs Concept25Walmart announced this week that it’s open-sourcing its cloud platform, called OneOps, to let developers build in the cloud without being locked into any specific cloud provider.

“OneOps is powerful cloud technology we built ourselves that has transformed the way our engineers develop and launch new products to our customers,” Walmart CTO Jeremy King said in the post announcing the project. “It’s great news for companies who have considered switching cloud providers but experience the ‘Hotel California Effect,’ where they can ‘check out but never leave’ their cloud provider because they’re locked into the provider’s proprietary APIs, architecture and tools.”

Walmart is jumping in on a market dominated by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Both companies have robust cloud platforms upon which developers can build scalable apps, and for Amazon, they generate a sizable portion of the company’s revenue.

By following in the footsteps of its largest competitor, Amazon, Walmart may be able to secure a more stable revenue stream. The company this week announced a projected 6 percent to 12 percent earnings decrease for next year, and its shares fell 10 percent on the news.

Walmart claims its cloud solution has a few other benefits over AWS and Azure, besides the lack of lock-in. As part of the open-source nature of their cloud, Walmart allows developers to spin up apps without learning proprietary APIs and tools. King says OneOps also “continuously ‘auto-pilots’ the app, scaling and repairing the app when unforeseen changes occur.”

WalmartLabs will have the OneOps source code on GitHub by the end of the year.

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