Customer Story
How a national retailer rebuilt its web and mobile commerce stack on Akka — 20% higher conversion, 98% more mobile orders, and 400,000 page views an hour at peak on commodity hardware.
Walmart rebuilt its web application and mobile stack on Akka and moved backend work to commodity virtual machines on its private cloud. Web conversion rose 20 percent and mobile orders rose 98 percent within four weeks of launch, while page load times fell 36 percent and the platform held 400,000 page views per hour at peak.
Akka ROI Scorecard
faster developer startup versus the legacy environment, with overall development time cut 2–3×.
lower web infrastructure cost over the long term (20–50%), as roughly 40% of compute shifted from dedicated hardware to commodity servers.
page views per hour at peak load, with page load times reduced 36% on the same commodity infrastructure.
Business outcome: web conversion +20%, mobile orders +98% in four weeks.
Walmart ran online sales on an inflexible legacy backend that required specialist teams and long development cycles. The platform depended on expensive dedicated infrastructure with no burst capacity, handled a limited number of concurrent requests, and was difficult to integrate with modern systems.
As shopping moved online and mobile, those limits capped both traffic and the pace of change. Peak retail events demanded far more concurrent load than the dedicated hardware could absorb, and every new feature carried the cost of a specialist team and a lengthy release cycle.
Walmart rebuilt its web and mobile stack on Akka to serve high concurrent traffic on elastic infrastructure. Backend tasks were migrated to commodity virtual machines on Walmart's private cloud, replacing dedicated hardware with elastic capacity.
The result was a platform that stayed responsive under peak retail load, scaled across commodity servers, and let developers ship far faster than the legacy environment allowed.
Scale. The platform sustained 400,000 page views per hour at peak, with roughly 40% of compute cycles shifted from dedicated hardware to commodity servers. Page load times fell 36%.
Cost to operate. Long-term web infrastructure costs fell 20–50%, as elastic commodity capacity replaced expensive dedicated hardware sized for peak.
Speed to production. Developer startup time was 7× faster than the legacy environment, and overall development time dropped 2–3×, a figure corroborated by the delivery lead architect.
Business impact. Web conversion rose 20% and mobile orders rose 98% within four weeks of launch. Simon Rodrigue, VP of eCommerce at Walmart, stated the rebuild "was good for our bottom line."
Walmart's web and mobile surfaces are exactly where agentic retail now operates: a shopper-facing AI agent that personalizes the storefront, manages cart and checkout, runs eligibility and fraud checks, and optimizes for conversion in real time under peak load. On the Akka Agentic AI Platform, those surfaces become governed AI agents running at the same 400,000-page-views-an-hour scale Walmart already proved — with durable state that survives failure and elastic capacity on commodity infrastructure.
The platform that scaled Walmart's commerce is the same platform that builds and runs agentic AI today. Enterprises build on the Akka Agentic AI Platform directly, or have a system delivered and operated through Akka Specify. Both provide the production guarantees Walmart has run on since launch.
