To compete in today’s retail environment, you have to be prepared to meet shoppers wherever they’re at. If the shopper is in store or on their way, the experience is fueled just as much by technology as the online or ecommerce experience is. Likewise, an in-store team member’s capacity to serve a customer “well” is more dependent than ever on quick, easy access to data and to powerful, reliable computing devices.

Stateful Apps in a Stateless World

Apache Cassandra has been used for many years at Target - since around 2014. This year, however, we had a new challenge to overcome (actually… two challenges!). First, we needed to deploy an individual Cassandra cluster inside all of our stores, and then these clusters needed to run inside Kubernetes. Cassandra is a database for persistent workloads, and in the past has not gotten along nicely with ephemeral environments. We needed to come up with a way to deploy Cassandra as a Docker container in Kubernetes, while still maintaining stability and consistency.

“It’s been quite extraordinary to watch – going from having 3,000 really good software engineers to 3,000 innovators.” – Target CIO Mike McNamara via ZDNet.