Walmart Open Sources Key Infrastructure Tool That Runs its Site

It's not top of mind for everyone, but Walmart has steadily become a significant contributor to the open source community. The company's Walmart Labs division has released a slew of open source projects, and now there is a significant new one arriving.

Electrode is a product of Walmart's migration to a React/Node.js platform.  Ir gives developers templated code to build universal React apps that incorporate modules that developers can leverage to add functionality to Node apps. It's a key part of how Walmart's site runs.

Walmart's site has 80 million monthly visitors, loads up to 10,000 requests per second, and includes 15 million items, adding more than one million new items each month. That's nothing to shake a stick at.

According to a post from Walmart:

"Our philosophy in creating Electrode was that developers should be able to take just what they need, without having to change the structure of their app. That’s why we split it into three parts: Electrode Core, Electrode Modules, and Electrode Tools."

"With hundreds of engineers across dozens of teams here at @WalmartLabs, we need to ensure that all of our applications are consistent and reliable, and follow the most scalable development practices. We also needed to focus results in consistent builds and deployments across projects, along with great scaffolding to start developers off on the right path. Electrode’s archetype system is what gives us the best practices and structures for building scalable applications we can trust."

 Walmart claims that the majority of Walmart.com now runs on the Electrode platform, including the home, login, cart, checkout, category, and item views. Among server-side rendered pages, the company reports, Electrode has made the home page now 20% faster and the login page 15% faster. The checkout page, which is client-side rendered, is 20% faster.

Especially if you want to run an online site at scale, find out more about Electrode here.