Accelerating grocery shopping

The challenge

Meeting the new era of grocery e-commerce

Grocery shopping has been transformed. Today, for every customer pushing a cart in the aisles, there’s placing an order online. The explosion of shopping options has pushed service to the forefront and drawn customers to technology that’s easy and intuitive to use. One of the world’s largest retailers, with annual sales of more than $121.1 billion, knows the landscape of the grocery industry better than anyone. They recognized the power of online sales early and needed technical expertise and perspective to set things in motion and seed the thinking about what was possible.  

Although online purchases, shipment and delivery were on the radar for them, the sheer size of the company and its many acquisitions had created a need for a shift from a complex patchwork of disparate systems and technologies to a unified, well-structured IT Department for the initiative. Due to this, the main challenge was to build a migration strategy and implement it.  

The approach

Deep dive discovery

To fully understand the scope of the challenge, the retail company initiated an in-depth discovery process to assess the current state of the systems and the platform. Beyond the technology, it was critical to evaluate its culture and the opportunities they were pursuing.  

As a result, they found that scaling beyond their on-premises capacity was necessary to accelerate growth. That meant consolidating data and functionality, going to the cloud, creating and managing APIs and internal and external user authentication and moving quickly to stay competitive.  

Even though hybrid clouds and Kubernetes were relatively new at the time, the company decided to transition to them as they allowed for a more flexible approach and prevented a single vendor lock-in. They implemented Kubernetes control plane in GCP using Kubernetes and Rancher, explored multi-region scenarios, along with the migration of old applications to the new technological stack as a preparation step and started the migration process.  

The outcome

Ready when it mattered most

After a comprehensive discovery phase and setting up an overarching strategy, one of the world’s largest retailers successfully transitioned to the cloud, integrated new technologies and established universal processes, particularly for customer-facing services like shipping and delivery. After that, they developed a functioning API that opened up new possibilities and accelerated adoption. As their online grocery sales were already growing before the COVID-19 pandemic, these services became essential for customers like never before when the lockdown started. It transformed the client’s platform into a solution perfectly suited to current customer needs.