Cloud transformation for a Top10 global retailer

Our Client is a Top10 global grocery and general merchandise retailer. With its scale, it is processing thousands of transactions per second, supporting delivery of 1,000,000,000+ (that’s 1 billion) items annually, growing its user base with an average 4 new registrations per minute, and having more than £50 billion of revenue every year only in Europe. The client is on the market for nearly a century now. As for any such organization it also has its history of different hardware technologies, software products, hundreds of 3rd party vendors, and many duplicated processes across over a dozen countries in which it operates.

Our goal was to provide migration to Azure cloud for the whole organization. Given the size and complexity of the organization, this went a long way beyond a purely technical solution and required very close coordination with management across many departments.

1. The first step towards this direction was providing a common Azure Cloud Platform together with the automated onboarding process, preconfigured environments, security policies, network connectivity to the data center, and monitoring standards – all consistent with organization standards and policies.

2. The next step was a much larger scope which was restructuring the whole ecosystem within the company in areas of Cloud-Native and Agile practices. This included setting the infrastructure, processes, and tooling for an organization of nearly 200 development teams and around 2,000 engineers. Not a small challenge and definitely not something that happens overnight.

• Introduction of tools for IaaC (Infrastructure as Code – Azure Templates / Terraform)
• Network infrastructure
• Identity Management and Access Control
• Monitoring, logging and alerting
• Planning compartmentalization and reducing blast radius
• System Design and cloud infrastructure best practices

• Planning of gradual onboarding (with various tools and technologies used by teams; from small services to large multi-cloud distributed systems with some legacy concerns)
• Self-service tools and democratization of tooling within the organization (inner sourcing, contribution model)
• Defining ownership and responsibility models
• Security, compliance and data protection policies
• Incident and Change Management processes
• Increase adoption of Cloud-Native technologies and build a community around it

Transforming such a large organization is a challenge for several years. Our cooperation with the customer is still ongoing and we are a leading 3rd party vendor helping the client to complete its cloud transformation.