The Home Depot moved a 450 TB on-premises warehouse to a cloud warehouse that now holds more than 15 PB, moved its SAP estate to the cloud from 2017, and funded it as part of an $11.1 billion three-year plan. What they did, in what order, and the lessons that apply on any cloud.
The Home Depot runs more than 2,200 stores, each stocking tens of thousands of products. Its modernization is well documented, mostly by its cloud provider, Google Cloud, which it has used since 2016. We build on AWS; the lessons below carry over almost unchanged.
Funded it as strategy. In December 2017 the company announced "One Home Depot", an $11.1 billion three-year investment plan, of which $5.4 billion was strategic, covering stores, e-commerce, delivery and a Pro customer ecosystem. It said it would hire more than 1,000 technologists to deliver it.
Moved the data warehouse first. A 450 TB on-premises warehouse was migrated and retired; the cloud warehouse now holds more than 15 PB across more than 600 projects.
Removed the capacity bottleneck. On-premises, adding warehouse capacity took six months of planning and a three-day outage. In the cloud it took about a week, with no interruption.
Moved SAP. Starting in 2017, S/4HANA, the Customer Activity Repository, general ledger, the e-commerce system and the enterprise warehouse moved to the cloud, with SAP data feeding analytics directly.
Put data to work: demand forecasting, supplier lead-time estimates, real-time application monitoring across stores and warehouses, and machine learning run inside the warehouse.
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The warehouse was the system most constrained by on-premises capacity, so moving it produced visible wins quickly and funded confidence for the rest.
Analytics are read-heavy and can run in parallel with the old system, so the migration could be proved before cutover. Transactional systems rarely allow that.
SAP moved once the data platform it fed already existed in the cloud, which removed a cross-environment data flow instead of creating one.
The technology plan was tied to a business story (an interconnected store and online experience) with a number attached. That is what kept a multi-year program funded.
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