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Comment by ViViDboarder | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been impressed by what I’ve heard about Walmart. They apparently won’t even use a SaaS tool if it’s hosted on Amazon.

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I worked at walmart labs for 3 years and that is correct. We had one, on premise, service that phoned home for license information to an AWS address and our request to whitelist the ip address had to go up to the CTO.

That’s changed hasn’t it? I remember going to a Walmart labs talk 5 years ago where they were all in on aws.

No. I don't think so. They really don't like AWS. It's all openstack/azure/gcp/vmware depending on the use case.

In my last job we used Basecamp for project management and then we started doing work for Walmart. They flat out said if you want to use a SaaS tool then they have to sign a liability agreement in case any trade secrets were leaked. Needless to say they said no as did everyone else. Which forced us into self hosting a ton of stuff.

Walmart uses a few big SaaS providers it’s weird they singled out Basecamp and self hosting. I built a couple integrations to Walmart’s SaaS products. We used off the self SaaS products hosted in the clouds too.

This was a few years ago right when Walmart Labs was taking off so their attitude probably changed some.

That makes sense. Even if private information isn't leaked, Amazon would still know things about usage and billing.

You can’t use AWS if you sell large amounts of stuff through Walmart either. One of my former clients demanded that we use Azure because of this.

You can use AWS, you just can't store any WalMart data there .. which is usually 30-90% of your data for your typical CPG.

Depending on how you define “store”, that basically means no AWS. This particular client understood this to mean no EC2, since data remains on disk, which cuts out the vast majority of the AWS offerings.

For this client the only AWS product we were cleared to use was Lambda, and only for integrating Alexis into the product.

Wow. That’s news to me. Walmart is so calculated.

It's just smart business.

Your random SaaS company is often a big shitshow. I've had more than one vendor Sales Engineer show me live customer data in response to performance or other questions. Startups and smaller SaaS companies in particular often demonstrate amazing levels of cluelessness.

I had that happen today.

We had an e-com SaaS company give us "sample product data" to help one our customers who was onboarding to their platform and was trying to figure out how to set up their product records and taxonomies, and the data turned out to be poorly anonymized real production data from one of our client's competitors who was also on the same SaaS platform.

That's pretty weird. AWS and Amazon's shop are two different companies. If they are afraid of leaking data, that two-hop scenario seems to be less of a problem than all the single-hop vendors they have themselves.

I used to work for a company that made POS and Self Checkouts. Walmart was a big customer and we had to make sure the stack didn’t have any AWS. Same with Target.

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