Lowe's left a packaged, monolithic e-commerce system from late 2018, invested more than $500 million a year and hired up to 2,000 engineers. Its internal platform, Carbon, now runs more than 1,000 workloads across cloud, data center and stores, and carried 111% e-commerce growth in 2020. What they built and how it compares with Home Depot's path.
Late 2018: Lowe's began moving off a packaged, monolithic e-commerce product that could not scale with demand, onto Google Cloud.
Funding and people: more than $500 million a year in technology through 2021, and plans to hire up to 2,000 engineers.
Built Carbon, an internal engineering platform on Google Kubernetes Engine with Terraform, Istio, Consul and Vault, deployed across two regions. It became the company's standard path for shipping software and runs more than 1,000 independent workloads across cloud, data centers and stores.
E-commerce and mobile deployments went from weeks to hours.
Merchandising, pricing and supply chain data were centralized in BigQuery, and 88,000 mobile devices went to store associates for real-time pricing and inventory.
The new platform carried 111% e-commerce growth in 2020, another 18% in 2021, and three record Black Fridays.
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Each started where its pain was worst. Home Depot's was analytics capacity; Lowe's was an e-commerce product it could not change fast enough. Both are valid first moves, because both produced visible results early.
Carbon is the important part of Lowe's story. A paved road that is easier than the alternative ("the path of least resistance", in Lowe's words) is how a platform gets adopted without mandates.
Both treated it as a hiring program. Neither transformation was bought from a vendor; both built engineering organizations.
On AWS the same shapes are EKS or ECS behind a platform team's templates, Redshift or an Iceberg lakehouse, and IoT or mobile device management for stores.
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