Greetings, Future Tech Titans! 👋

The cloud world is changing fast, and it’s not just about chasing the newest platforms or following the loudest trends. It’s about what actually works when you need to scale big—and stay agile while doing it.

In this newsletter, I’m sharing some major lessons from Walmart’s incredible cloud journey. We’ll dive into:

• Starting Small, Scaling Smart: How humble beginnings fueled a million-core private cloud.

• Hybrid by Necessity: Why adaptability beats loyalty to any single platform.

• Innovation at Scale: From painful upgrades to seamless, stateless upgrades.

• Automation as Oxygen: How Walmart runs a massive cloud with a lean team.

• My personal take: The mindset shifts we can all learn from Walmart’s approach.

If you’ve ever wondered what it really takes to build and scale resilient infrastructure without drowning in complexity, you’re going to love this.

Let’s rethink what’s possible together!

Erwin Dwight

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FREE CONTENT

Walmart’s Million-Core Cloud Revolution: How OpenStack Defies Myths and Redefines Hybrid Scaling

Imagine a private cloud powering one of the world’s largest retailers, scaling to over a million cores while defying the tech world’s claim that “OpenStack is dead.” Walmart’s cloud journey, revealed at OpenInfra Days North America, is a masterclass in relentless innovation, hybrid scalability, and automation that transforms complexity into efficiency. From humble beginnings to seamless million-core upgrades, this is the story of how Walmart rewrote the rules of private cloud infrastructure—and why it’s time to rethink everything you thought you knew about OpenStack.

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3 Buckets of Work Time

In a reflective article on reorganizing his daily schedule, Cory outlines his strategy for staying productive while overseeing a global team from Oklahoma. He divides his tasks into three categories: Conversations, Doing the Work, and Thinking About the Work. Amidst adjusting to leadership transitions and juggling family obligations in his late 40s, Cory seeks to create routines that invigorate him instead of feeling restrictive, all while recognizing the importance of controlling his inclination to overextend himself and worry.

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Engineers were not allocating sufficient time to tackle the root causes of pages, hinder recurrence, or automate runbooks for common errors. Hugo recognized this as a prioritization challenge and ensured that they would never receive multiple pages for the same issue.

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That’s it for this episode!

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