How Walmart’s Sam’s Club Accelerates Retail with Tencent Cloud Serverless

Since Walmart entered China in 1996, Sam’s Club has grown to millions of paid members and become the country’s leading membership‑based retailer.

Facing a weekly release cadence, the need for seamless user experience, and the high cost of maintaining thousands of servers for online traffic, Sam’s Club required a more efficient deployment model.

Serverless Solution: Tencent Cloud SCF Default‑Alias Gray Release

The chosen solution is Tencent Cloud Serverless Cloud Function (SCF) with its default‑alias gray‑release strategy. The $default alias contains two versions: $latest and the most recently published version. Deployments set the traffic parameter to allocate a portion of traffic to $latest. Each new feature is deployed with sls deploy, initially routing a fraction of traffic to $latest for observation, then gradually shifting to 100 % before solidifying the version.

Key Advantages

Risk control and user experience : Traffic can be re‑balanced instantly to roll back problematic releases, and gray releases protect clients from breaking changes.

Fast verification for high‑frequency iteration : Serverless isolates environments and enables rapid deployment, ideal for quick feature validation.

Elastic scaling and cost savings : Functions auto‑scale down to zero when idle, eliminating the need for dozens of idle servers; custom aliases offer finer‑grained control for complex release strategies.

Retail E‑Commerce Scenarios Powered by Serverless

1. Peak‑traffic events (e.g., Double 11, 618) – SCF provides instant cold‑starts as short as 90 ms (effective 200 ms) and supports thousands of concurrent nodes, handling millions of requests per minute.

2. Live‑streaming and CPU‑intensive workloads – SCF removes the burden of managing transcoding servers, offering on‑demand FFmpeg execution, 128 GB/64 CPU instances for 4K video, and per‑millisecond billing that dramatically cuts costs.

3. Event‑driven image processing – Functions trigger on object‑storage uploads to perform cropping, watermarking, and cross‑region replication without provisioning web servers, leveraging pre‑warm concurrency to eliminate cold‑start latency.

These capabilities enable Sam’s Club to maintain rapid iteration, ensure seamless upgrades, and reduce operational expenses while delivering a superior shopping experience.

“The Chinese market is fiercely competitive, yet full of opportunities. We will continue to drive technology forward, iterating quickly and maintaining high quality to protect every consumer’s experience.” – Jason Wang, Technical Director, Walmart China