How Ocado broke down its monoliths to create a scalable, saleable Smart Platform
Ocado wrote most of its own software and intends to sell it to other retailers - but the original monolithic architecture had to be torn down first
Breaking down the monoliths
"Our current challenge is to create a warehouse system that can power the world's largest retailers - so we couldn't use monoliths any more," said Periquito. "It's very hard to create monoliths; it's very hard to replicate...and they're very expensive to start with…Instead, we had to use models: buildable parts that we could grow as and when we need. If we need to pack more items, we add more bots.
"[In the new system] we have all these moving parts, so scale out naturally became very important. If we want to add more resources, we add more resources - we don't try to grow the resources we have. That means we can expend capital if and when we need to; hopefully we don't have such a huge capital expense at the building."
Cornford added, "The monoliths are mostly gone, and we've moved to a more service-based architecture; something that's horizontally scalable and expects underlying infrastructure to fail. This is great because it means that our applications are more reliable in the face of actual hardware failures, and in the face of planned failure, like deployments and upgrades… It means we can do these things more often."
Ocado took its first steps to becoming a technology supplier late last year, and it intends to continue this expansion - aiming at what Periquito called "the infrastructure Holy Grail": starting from a completely powered-off server room and warehouse, but able to automatically turn everything on, deploying infrastructure and applications and configuring the network without anyone touching it - anywhere in the world.
"This," he admits, "is a really big challenge."
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