Walmart Forcing Developers To Stay Away From AWS

The fight between Walmart and Amazon has moved from supermarket aisles to the cloud! The retail giant is telling its partners to leave the Amazon cloud, and move their hosted apps off of AWS.

Which it says is a competitive platform.

No surprises, then, that all this surfaced following the blockbuster Whole Foods acquisition.

Walmart typically stores data on premises, or on other cloud services like Microsoft Azure. But now the company is pushing vendors to host their apps elsewhere. Only a limited number of technology partners have been asked to do this, with Walmart explaining its stance:

“Our vendors have the choice of using any cloud provider that meets their needs and their customers’ needs. It shouldn’t be a big surprise that there are cases in which we’d prefer our most sensitive data isn’t sitting on a competitor’s platform.”

It is being alleged that Walmart was flat out telling its technology partners who develop or sell products at its stores not to use Amazon Web Services, and instead get their apps onto Microsoft Azure, if they wanted to continue to do business with the retail giant.

Walmart has, of course, been a longtime customer for Azure, and offers a number of developer tools specifically designed for Microsoft’s cloud platform.

Amazon, meanwhile, believes these latest moves from Walmart are attempts to bully vendors, and are essentially bad both for business and customers.

That said, there is a feeling that this is just the start, as there are reports that other large retailers are also request service providers to move away from AWS. This Walmart and Amazon skirmish could well turn out to be just the tip of the iceberg, if other companies shy away from Amazon Web Services.

Game on.