Walmart and the CICS Asynchronous API: An Adoption Experience

An IBM Redbooks course

by Pradeep Gohil, Randy Frerking, Rich Jackson, Kellie Mathis

This video series we follow the experience of the Walmart delivery team as they embrace asynchronous processing patterns in enterprise-grade applications. The series describes the methodology, design and thought process used by Walmart and the considerations of the choices made. By using IBM CICS asynchronous API, Walmart enhanced a complex search capability to achieve large scale transactions in minimal time. This video series is a companion to the IBM Redbooks publication Walmart and the CICS Asynchronous API: An Adoption Experience.

Target audience

This video series is of interest to:
  • Enterprise Architects searching for faster ways to service strategic applications across the enterprise.
  • Solution Architects who want to better understand implementation possibilities for improved response times and better performance for CICS applications.
  • CICS programmers looking to modernize and provide improved response times.

Lecture 01
Introduction

Walmart has successfully deployed applications that use the IBM CICS asynchronous API and shares their experiences in this video series. In this video we meet the team and are presented with a high level architecture of the solution.

Lecture 02
Background and requirements

In this video we are introduced to asynchronous processing with the CICS Asynchronous API. We learn the initial problem space Walmart were faced with and how they assessed an ambitious set of requirements to build an Event Processing Service.

Lecture 03
Initial sequential approach

At least 1 million records per second was expected to satisfy the minimum requirements of the Event Processing Service. This video describes the initial testing that benchmarked the I/O rates and determined the feasibility of the objective.

Lecture 04
Homegrown asynchronous solution

It quickly became apparent that serially searching the collection of events would not be sufficient. Response time goals were still out of reach for our initial application. This video explores how Walmart satisfied the SLA by using asynchronous methods to allow searches to run in parallel.

Lecture 05
IBM CICS asynchronous solution

This videos explores the search function that uses the IBM CICS asynchronous API to perform parallel I/O processing. The video also describes the actions that were needed to migrate from the homegrown solution to this new design.

Lecture 06
Other implementation patterns

Walmart leverages the CICS asynchronous API in several other ways. This video explores three additional use cases.

Follow IBM Redbooks

Follow IBM Redbooks