At a couple of recent conferences around DevOps (MSP DevOps Days and DevOps Enterprise Summit), Heather Mickman and Ross Clanton from Target explained some high level concepts and actions we’re taking to break our mold of working on complex problems. When presented with an opportunity to work differently and challenge our normal delivery of IT assets - from plan to decommission - what would that look like?
Tuesday, October 14th 2015, Target affirmed its commitment to technology and leadership in the retail space by joining the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). As a company that cares about delivering great experiences for customers, we realize those experiences are now steeped in technology. One way Target can have a significant impact on shaping technology is open engagement with other companies and organizations at the heart of emerging development - the W3C enables us to do just that.
This past week, Target open-sourced our first project, a Chef cookbook for Apache Cassandra. This cookbook is the exact version we use to manage our production Cassandra environment. I want to go in to some more detail about how the cookbook is used and how we automate our Cassandra deployment.
We have been using Cassandra in production for about a year now. We use it to serve up product and inventory information through our Products API. Currently, we have a 12-node Cassandra cluster. Each node is a physical server with a 24-core processor, 400gb RAM, and 12 SSD hard drives.
Welcome to the new Target Tech blog! At Target we do amazing things with technology everyday. This blog is a place for Target team members to tell their stories about how we use technology to make retail awesome. You can expect to read a wide array of topics here; anything from announcing new open source projects to how we use technologies and tools to do what we do. We’ve been itching to do this for a while, and now we have a way to share the exciting stuff we create and work with each day. Follow along with us. We’ve...
When our stores open on Thanksgiving day, we see an API traffic spike that is 10x our normal load. To ensure our systems are up to the task of handling the burst, we need to go beyond the typical load tests run as part of our continuous integration pipeline (someday we will write about our continuous performance testing!). Black Friday traffic requires a unique load profile and it requires all of our APIs to be tested simultaneously.