If you want evidence of just how different Internet retail and brick-and-mortar retail are, you just have to look at what's going on with the world's largest retailer. In the same week that Walmart announced the closing of over 100 physical stores, the company's e-commerce unit announced that it is releasing a piece of its cloud-management infrastructure as open source—publishing the OneOps platform on Github. The company's internal e-commerce development unit, @Walmartlabs, has released OneOps under the Apache 2.0 license.

OneOps is a tool built around the philosophy of DevOps—a "cloud management and application lifecycle management platform," as Walmart Chief Technology Officer Jeremy King described it in a blog post. That places it in the same space as tools like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and Amazon Web Services' Elastic Beanstalk but with some specific differences that have driven its development and adoption at Walmart.

OneOps works with any public, private, or hybrid cloud that uses the OpenStack cloud environment (including CenturyLink and Rackspace), as well as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. It can automatically configure, repair, and scale up applications across multiple cloud providers. Like other tools, it also automates the creation of virtual machine instances for developers, handling security settings and other image configuration tasks. But it can also move applications from one cloud to another on a user's command as lower costs, better availability, available bandwidth, security, capacity, or other technological advantages dictate.

Couchbase has built integration with its NoSQL database platform into OneOps. The Apache TomEE and OpenEJB "tribe" has also contributed a plugin for Tomcat and TomEE, and Walmart has built plugins for a laundry list of common Web and cloud application components. These include Node.js, the PostgreSQL and Cassandra databases, the Ubuntu and CentOS server operating systems, the Docker application platform, and a number of Web scripting and programming languages (including Ruby, PHP. Perl and Go).

King said that the company is publishing OneOps as open source because "Walmart is a cloud user, not a cloud provider. 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."

A community around OneOps would also theoretically give Walmart access to those improvements more quickly and less expensively than the company could manage with its own internal development team, though King said Walmart is continuing to develop plugins for other application technologies that will be rolled into the platform.

This isn't Walmart's first open source move. The company's developers have made commits to Node.js and React, and Walmart has also published its MUPD8 fast data and stream processing framework as well as the hapi server framework for Node.js through Github.