Infrastructure

We deliver and operate infrastructure capabilities that are stable, secure, simple, and efficient, while scaled to support hundreds of thousands of team members and the experiences of millions of guests every day in one of the world’s largest retailers. We build and run cloud and compute platforms, network connectivity, data centers, field engineering, and big data systems that power our stores, digital, and supply chain experiences. Our software engineers develop distributed systems that run elastic compute across the hybrid cloud and the edge. Our hardware engineers operate IoT technology in stores, deploy wearables and robots in our supply chain, and integrate hardware in our data centers.

Recent blogs

  • Circuit board photographed in red light.

    Firmware Updates: What They Are and Why They Matter

    November 14, 2023
    By Sandeep Mendiratta
    Learn how Target Infrastructure engineers built a fully automated firmware update system.
  • A diagram of a mobile device interacting with Point of Sale devices via POSSUM web APIs

    Introducing POSSUM, An Open Source Retail Peripheral Platform for All

    September 27, 2023
    By Adam Nawrocki
    Learn about our newest open source product which provides hardware abstraction for industry standard retail peripherals.
  • rocky outcrop of a mountain with a gnarled tree growing out from the stones, with a beautiful cloudy mountain scene in the background

    Chaos Leads to Resilience

    November 10, 2022
    By Deepa Kn
    How Target uses chaos experiments to test the resilience of our architecture.
  • Target ICCON conference logo next to Target tech logo

    Target’s Cloud Journey

    October 21, 2022
    By Hari Govind
    Target began its cloud journey nearly a decade ago. Since then, Target tech teams have expanded our technology footprint to a hybrid-multi-cloud architecture.
  • diagram of Target system architecture with tenants listed on top (retail, analytical, and IT) with three buckets of components for each listed below. Retail components (shared services, aggregations, and core data), analytical (aggregations, analytical data sets, historic core) and IT (matching the retail components)

    Hardening the Registers: A Cascading Failure of Edge Induced Fault Tolerance

    June 22, 2022
    By John Engelman
    In 2017, Target announced that we had prioritized stores at the center of how we serve our guests – no matter how they choose to shop. To make this store-as-hubs model work, we spent several years redesigning operations and modernizing how we conduct business. We invested billions of dollars into remodeling stores, hardened our world-class supply chain, and created a robust suite of fulfillment options to meet every guest need.
  • diagram showing a hypothetical POS architecture, with a register on top, flowing into a box labeled "cart service," that then flows ID data into three buckets named price, promo, and item, each flowing into separate databases labeled "PromoDB"

    Triaging in Target’s Distributed Point of Sale Ecosystem

    June 9, 2022
    By Tyghe Vallard
    Across Target.com and nearly 2,000 stores, we run a complex and highly distributed point of sale (POS) ecosystem. And as we invest heavily in a great omnichannel POS experience, we continue to develop and scale new features for a variety of applications including store registers and self-checkout, our team members’ handheld myDevices, and our award-winning guest mobile app. As a result, we manage more software with a growing number of interactions – a single scan of an item during checkout could mean touching a distributed tree of dozens of services, with hundreds of thousands of these done per minute.
  • Target SVP pictured in front of bookshelves, wearing a down vest and glasses on the left side, next to a screenshot of a Powerpoint slide reading "Target's Infrastructure Journey"

    The Journey to a Hybrid-Multi-Cloud

    February 17, 2022
    By Hari Govind
    Target's cloud journey started about a decade ago. First there was Amazon Web Services (AWS). Followed by IBM Cloud. Then Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We have since expanded to a Hybrid-Multi-Cloud architecture with GCP and Microsoft Azure.
  • image of four Target engineers seated at a table working on their four individual laptops

    50 Days of Learning: One Week as an Engineer

    August 9, 2019
    By Adam Westman
    How embedding as a software engineer results in learning and empathy.
  • GoAlert logo with a red thought bubble containing small red dog wagging its tail next to the words "GoAlert"

    GoAlert - Now Available in Open Source

    June 11, 2019
    By Adam Westman
    Open Source GoAlert Is Now Available At https://github.com/target/goalert
  • outline of the word 'chaos' filled in with a maze-like design, with the word 'engineering' in block letters underneath

    Ɔhaos Ǝnginǝǝring @ Target - Part 2

    May 9, 2019
    By Jason Doffing and Brian Lee
    What is a Game Day?
  • Target Measuremint logo - a smiley cartoon red and white peppermint wearing Target red and khaki, holding a ruler and measuring tool

    GoAlert - Your Future Open Source, On-Call Notification Product

    February 25, 2019
    By Adam Westman
    A few years ago, Target started a journey to move into a product-based organization with dedicated, durable, full-stack teams.
  • outline of the word 'chaos' filled in with a maze-like design, with the word 'engineering' in block letters underneath

    Ɔhaos Ǝnginǝǝring @ Target - Part 1

    February 5, 2019
    By Brian Lee, Sean Peters, and Jason Doffing
    Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.

  • Meet Target’s Stores Deployment Interface that Realizes Distributed Edge Computing at Retail Scale

    June 20, 2018
    By Dan Woods
    At the beginning of 2017... ... our engineering team embarked on a journey to facilitate rapid software delivery to Target stores to better enable innovation and more quickly respond to ever-evolving business needs.