ACF Automated Code Formation Engineering Excellence
Article Summary
Walmart's engineering team cut time-to-market for cloud self-service platforms from 26 weeks to under 2 weeks. Here's the framework that made it possible.
The team built ACF (Automated Code Formation), a code generation framework that orchestrates micro-applications and infrastructure as code. It automatically generates UI screens, backend APIs, database schemas, Terraform modules, and deployment workflows from spec files and templates.
Key Takeaways
- Reduced MTTM from 26 weeks to less than 2 weeks for cloud platforms
- Framework generates entire stack: UI, APIs, DB schemas, Terraform, and workflows
- Uses Jinja2 templates with spec files to create plug and play applications
- Automated CI/CD with unit tests, integration tests, and Sonar coverage
- Built on 6 components: templates, spec files, ER models, libraries, asset builder, deployment
Walmart created a self-serve code generation engine that slashed cloud platform delivery time by 92% while standardizing the entire development lifecycle.
About This Article
Walmart's engineering teams struggled with inconsistent deployment processes when provisioning cloud resources. Creating infrastructure code manually was slowing down their ability to launch new self-service platforms.
Yadu Mathur's team built ACF with six core components: templates, spec files, entity-relationship models, reusable libraries, an asset builder, and Kubernetes deployment. The framework automatically generates complete application stacks from configuration files using Jinja2 templating.
The framework cut mean time to market from 26 weeks down to under 2 weeks. It also standardized git repositories, naming conventions, folder structures, and CI/CD pipelines across all generated projects.