Case Study: Walmart achieves 55,000+ node scale and faster, higher-quality deployments with Puppet

How Walmart scaled Puppet to 55,000 nodes and beyond

Walmart set out to speed delivery and improve build quality by centralizing automation across its distributed compute environment—data centers, public clouds, distribution centers and stores. A small, empowered team chose open-source Puppet to unify server-build processes, and management challenged them to scale from a few thousand nodes to tens of thousands in a matter of months, pushing the team to prove Puppet could handle the company’s large, diverse footprint.

The team iteratively deployed Puppet, adding splay/retry logic, scaling servers and classifiers, and load‑balancing the infrastructure as they learned. That approach delivered more than 30,000 nodes reporting to a single, load‑balanced Puppet infrastructure before the original deadline, and subsequent upgrades and Windows support expanded management to over 55,000 nodes on a single administrative Puppet instance—an outcome enabled by leadership trust and strong team ownership.

Walmart

Martin Jackson

Walmart