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I joined the Edge Foundation team @WalmartLabs about a year ago. We help manage the HTTP ingress flow (CDNs, WAF, Tier 1/2 proxies and LBs, etc) for all Walmart
by gbrayut 8y ago
I joined the Edge Foundation team @WalmartLabs about a year ago. We help manage the HTTP ingress flow (CDNs, WAF, Tier 1/2 proxies and LBs, etc) for all Walmart eCommerce properties. Our custom proxy also does some basic and not so basic frontend optimizations (js and css compression/minification/bundling, image resizing, url rewrites, etc) and handles a large portion of routing requests to backend servers.
This is a great write up from earlier this year, and from the screenshots it looks like it was before our new site design launched. That was a pretty massive modernization effort that included some site performance improvements. We also now have a sizeable team (100+) focused on some of the other details from the article. Brotli for instance went into A/B testing this month.
There are a lot of moving parts and changing priorities at a company the size of Walmart, and development and deployments can be slower than at smaller shops. But there definitely is active progress on improving our site speed.
And if you like working on any of these kinds of systems we are always hiring!
- nn3 8y ago>Brotli for instance went into A/B testing this month. Why would you put a better compression algorithm into A/B testing? That doesn't make any sense at all. >deployments can be slower than at smaller shops No shit, if you do things like the above. It's on the level as the (in)famous A/B testing of shades of blue that most people cannot distinguish.
- gbrayut 8y agoHow can you know it is an improvement if you don't measure it?
- tomnipotent 8y agoGuessing you haven't worked on a large distributed system or been responsible for revenue-producing LOB software deployments managing hundreds of millions in revenue. "Shit" like this is important. Like lose-your-job important.
- watchdogtimer 8y agoGlad to hear it. I find Walmart's web site to be so slow on my PC to be almost unusable. I hate to think what the experience must be like for users on old computers or really low end phones.
- londons_explore 8y agoI think http://www.foundem.co.uk/ http://www.foundem.co.uk/ is a good example of how lightweight and fast an ecommerce site can be. And I bet it was made by just one guy in a few weeks too.
- wafflesraccoon 8y agoIt has a very mid 00s feel to it, I wonder how old the codebase is.
- dagoat 8y agoClick on hotels and you get this: http://www.foundem.co.uk/hygiene/Temporary_Announcement_2016.jsp http://www.foundem.co.uk/hygiene/Temporary_Announcement_2016...
- beauzero 8y agoOn older PC, dsl (rural), Windows 10, and latest Chrome. It is more than acceptable for me because it works. Lots of cute websites don't because of broken JavaScript or slow library downloads.
- iamakulov 8y agoHey, I’m the author or the article. Kudos for the great work, really like the new site!