[mike_d]

When I was at Walmart the holy grail was edge compute in every store (which I think is now live). There is a mainframe in each store that powers point-of-sale, inventory, etc. But in terms of building modern apps, you couldn't assume 24/7 local connectivity was a thing or that it would be fast enough for what you wanted to do.

Making each location its own failure domain was also a huge win. Imagine a cloud outage taking out hundreds of stores.

[sithadmin]

>There is a mainframe in each store Nope. vSphere clusters in every store. Possibly the biggest ‘field’ footprint of vSphere that exists.

[mike_d]

That might be true, but the heart of every store is an AS/400 or whatever IBM now calls the iSeries replacement.