Client background & business context

Client: Food retail company. With 3.400 employees and a customer base close to 80K, the company offers approx. 41K articles from direct suppliers and more than 1.200 other articles under their own brand. ​

Project: Build an SSO cloud platform and enhance capabilities integrated with the existing on-prem systems.

Challenges

The company needed a partner with the necessary know-how and experience to design the entire plan for creating and executing a hybrid cloud infrastructure using Azure. During the project, we faced the following challenges:

  • Future-readiness: enable a platform capable to accommodate future requirements. Ensuring the flexibility of deploying new applications in the Azure ecosystem was an important requirement and challenge for this project.
  • Redesign the architecture to be more efficient: The expectation for this project was to increase working speed and flexibility, boost team productivity, and continuously ensure the performance and reliability level that their customers had come to expect from the company.
  • Seamless infrastructure migration to Azure: Ensuring minimal system downtime.
  • Enabling DevOps: Improving or creating new processes, Automation, Continuous Integrations and Continuous Delivery, Monitoring, Application performance, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery for the platform and infrastructure.

Our approach

As a standard approach for these types of projects, we structured our work in three main phases: plan – build – run, each with its own particularities and milestones.

During the planning period we gathered all the functional and non-functional requirements and our team designed an infrastructure with a focus on reliability and scalability according to the client’s needs. After the architectural design approval, we started the implementation of the hybrid cloud solution that would comply with the client’s requirements. We ensured the extensibility and scalability of the cloud platform by implementing a micro-services architecture​ design and allowed a certain level of flexibility on the technology stack in order to accommodate future demands. The entire infrastructure and platform can be fully provisioned automatically, resulting in increased efficiency and faster time to market.

As part of the implementation, we leveraged the Azure capabilities and services, by using Azure DevOps tool stack and Azure Kubernetes Services for fast and efficient deployment. In the end, we implemented Monitoring, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery for the platform on the new, fully automated cloud infrastructure​.

Technologies

  • Azure DevOps
  • Azure API Management
  • Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
  • Azure Service Bus
  • Azure Key Vault
  • Azure Pipelines
  • Ansible

Results

Through this migration, we implemented a scalable, automated, robust, and flexible system which can support the company in its business needs and growth​.

By leveraging Azure Cloud’s capabilities, our clients can view in real time the usage, metrics and performance of the application in order to achieve maximum efficiency and increasing the end customers satisfaction. Therefore, resources will be automatically scaled based on real time demand, thus optimizing costs and enhancing the overall customer experience.

The collaboration is ongoing, and we continue to offer full support to the company.

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