When I was at Walmart the holy grail was edge compute in every store (which I think is now live). There is a mainframe in each store that powers point-of-sale, inventory, etc. But in terms of building modern apps, you couldn't assume 24/7 local connectivity was a thing or that it would be fast enough for what you wanted to do.
Making each location its own failure domain was also a huge win. Imagine a cloud outage taking out hundreds of stores.
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When I was at Walmart the holy grail was edge compute in every store (which I think is now live). There is a mainframe in each store that powers point-of-sale, inventory, etc. But in terms of building modern apps, you couldn't assume 24/7 local connectivity was a thing or that it would be fast enough for what you wanted to do.
Making each location its own failure domain was also a huge win. Imagine a cloud outage taking out hundreds of stores.
That might be true, but the heart of every store is an AS/400 or whatever IBM now calls the iSeries replacement.