Production Deployment
James brought OpenStack and other cloud technologies to WalmartLabs. He championed the adoption of Openstack within Walmart E-Commerce, leading efforts behind initial installs and production pilots. Starting with Essex, he guided the cloud program from an engineering project to an operations practice, and through full production deployment. Successfully serving holiday traffic for Walmart.com in 2014 on OpenStack was the culmination of 2 years of work driving the use and acceptance of cloud application patterns and operational practices. As an evangelist of infrastructure automation and DevOps practices, other key efforts involved the evolution of organizational thinking and mindsets, as well as developing governance models for cloud applications and operations. Prior to working with OpenStack starting in 2011, he had actively been involved with building compute grids and utility computing technologies over the last two decades. James has 20 years of experience in complex technology operations at companies ranging from startups to multi-national corporations across a number of industries.