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So there were a whole series of full-time networking technologies that were deployed. We did ATM, we did \[unintelligible 00:27:40.29\] Frame relay... A whole bunch of those things. But a lot of those still had some really serious availability limitations, and crucially, bandwidth limitations. So it wasn't until past t... |
**Autumn Nash:** How do you get a whole store's worth of inventory and data on the size of a Walmart store with that low of -- that's wild. |
**Justin Garrison:** You don't. That's why you put all the servers in the stores. |
**Martin Jackson:** And that is why you put servers in stores. Because with the variability of the user experience for what it would take to look that stuff up in real time, it's a lot easier to preload it and maintain it locally, and then synchronize differences. There were a whole lot of internal Walmart protocols th... |
**Autumn Nash:** Were you still at Walmart when it got to the point where people were ready to re-architect that framework overall, to try to make it more modernized? Because I feel like at some point something's got to give. |
**Martin Jackson:** Yes. |
**Autumn Nash:** When we do retro episodes, I think about all the things that we complain about now, and then it puts it into really good perspective. You were like "I wish I had RPMs", and I was like "Oh goodness. There's something worse." So at some point, I'm sure... |
**Martin Jackson:** I came to Red Hat because I loved Red Hat technologies. But RPMs - RPMs are cool when you understand them. It's just that RPM is very picky about who it allows it to understand. |
**Autumn Nash:** How do you re-architect something so big in that way? Because the way that you're explaining it, with it growing so fast and it being the first retailer to grow that fast, you're solving a problem that's never been solved. So how did you go about re-architecting that system to solve this new problem? T... |
**Martin Jackson:** \[29:55\] Yeah. Well, my move to what would become the configuration management team was a big part of that. We recognized that there were a whole lot of things that we needed to modernize. But because of the way that technology rollouts happen in a company that size, and with national reach and glo... |
And that's never a perfect transition plan, but you're kind of like Indiana Jones at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where you've got the bag of sand, like "Yeah, it looks you need a couple ounces", and you put the bag of sand down, and the boulder's coming. You know the boulder's coming. But you're just hopi... |
I kid you not, for many years - and it wouldn't surprise me if this is still very much a thing that happens, because I haven't been there for a couple of years, but... We always refer to the server images as tapes, because for a long time they were literally tapes. If you needed to DR a store, it went to the tape drive... |
Lots of people around Walmart still called logging into a server dialing in. "Oh yeah, I'm going to dial into 873." Dial in? What do you mean? |
**Justin Garrison:** You were literally dialing a phone number, and making sure a computer picks up on the other side. |
**Martin Jackson:** Yeah. That's what it was. |
**Autumn Nash:** So I'm guessing for a long time you were maintaining two different architectures while you were moving stores over? What was it maintaining both of those, and how long did it go on? Because I feel like when you're trying to herd people over to a new system, it's very hard. |
**Martin Jackson:** All of my best information says that that transition is still ongoing. |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. Every large enterprise is in a stage of migration, and it doesn't matter how much, what percentage. |
**Autumn Nash:** I mean, I feel like it's constantly, but I mean, just to the systems that you were going from the mainframe-influenced architecture to something more modern. I'm sure that it's in a constant state of migration, but basically to what you were trying to migrate it? Did you ever get to a point where every... |
**Martin Jackson:** No. |
**Autumn Nash:** Wow. |
**Martin Jackson:** I know for a fact that big chunks of the mainframe-influenced architecture is still in place, and they plan to keep them in place for quite some time. |
**Autumn Nash:** See, this is why I say legacy tech is going to be just -- everyone's always like "Don't you want to work in AI?" And I'm like "I'm good... It'll be fine..." |
**Justin Garrison:** Well, legacy makes the money, right? The new stuff -- if you open a new store, you have a chance to redesign some things and say "Hey, I need a bigger data center", or "I need more cooling" or whatever it is for the new store, but you still have the other 5,000 stores that's like "Well, what does i... |
**Martin Jackson:** Well, we made our own. That's what it was. It was tar-based. I mean, okay, if you're allowed to hate one thing about RPM, speaking as a Red Hat person - the fact that RPM was CPIO based is nutty. I don't get why they did that. I'm sure they believe that they had really good reasons for it at the tim... |
**Autumn Nash:** Red Hat needs to give you a raise... The way that you go so hard for Red Hat, I love it. |
**Martin Jackson:** \[34:04\] I made a big decision 22 years into my career, and I'd better believe in it. Yes. |
**Autumn Nash:** I love that. |
**Justin Garrison:** Now, what did it look like as you're rolling out configuration management on all these stores, and you're saying "Hey, we have this new system. We want you all to move to it", and you're trying to centralize some of that data. Obviously, you have network connectivity, or you have things that are ou... |
**Martin Jackson:** Oh, no. No, no, no, no. We didn't, we didn't run Puppet servers in stores. The Puppet server components were all centralized. |
**Justin Garrison:** Oh. So they're all getting manifest from one location, and then running them. |
**Martin Jackson:** Yup. |
**Justin Garrison:** Okay. I used to run Puppet at a couple of places, and scaling Puppet servers is not an easy thing, because that's where the load is. They're doing the compilation of what the server specs are, and the manifest and everything, and it says "Oh, all the heavylifting goes to the server", instead of thi... |
**Martin Jackson:** That was one of the most exciting and fun things that I got to do from the years 2014 to 2016. Because the scaling of the head end Puppet infrastructure was primarily my responsibility during that time. Part of the big story there is that in especially 2014 we had very aggressive infrastructure mana... |
There was one day - and I tell this story in the Puppet conf 2015 keynote, because this is the way it actually happened. He called us in in August of 2014, after we deployed Puppet to a few hundred servers... And this was a pretty big deal, you know? Changes are automatically happening in some stores based on this... A... |
**Justin Garrison:** 2000 stores in two months? |
**Martin Jackson:** Yeah. |
**Autumn Nash:** Wow... |
**Martin Jackson:** It gets better. One of the guys said "Well, crap. If we're going to do 2000 stores, we might as well do all of them." |
**Autumn Nash:** Oh, no...! |
**Martin Jackson:** And everybody just looked, and they're like "Uhh..." |
**Autumn Nash:** But why? |
**Martin Jackson:** Yeah. Sicilian guy says "Yes! I love it! That's the spirit!" |
**Autumn Nash:** Did he have a pager? |
**Martin Jackson:** Oh yeah. Yeah. |
**Justin Garrison:** Someone just in the back, "Do all of them!" |
**Martin Jackson:** Yeah. No, we all had pagers at that time. Senior leadership would go into the big war rooms with us. |
**Justin Garrison:** How did you roll that out? The one time that I've shifted an entire infrastructure to start using configuration management, I literally used Ansible to go deploy Puppet. I was like "I have SSH access. Let me go install this agent, bootstrap it, and then we're off to the races", right? |
**Martin Jackson:** Luxury. |
**Autumn Nash:** \[37:49\] But did you test it on a few of them first, or did you actually just roll them all out and just hoped for the best? |
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