Simplify Cloud Operations for Large Supermarket Chains

Through a transition from GCP (Google Cloud Platform) to Amazon Web Service, a leading supermarket operations firm efficiently streamlined its cloud infrastructure management, resulting in a reduction in maintenance intricacies and an annual cost savings of $70,000.

About the client

AWS

Python

PostgreSQL

This article describes a real-life project. However, we cannot disclose our client’s name for privacy purposes.

The client is a major supermarket chain operations company in Japan that generated approximately 5B USD in annual sales in 2022. The corporate’s main lines of business encompass the processing and import of goods, along with IT management. Currently, they bear the mantle of ensuring operational excellence and driving digital acceleration across three distinct supermarket chains.

Project Overview

Industry

Retail & eCommerce

Technology

AWS, Python, PostgreSQL, Django, Odoo, CDK

Country

Japan

Duration

8 months

Challenges

Limitation in GCP’s Functionality

The client previously established three Odoo-based ERPs for their distinctive chains on GCP. However, the platform’s deficiency in native micro-services impeded them from effectively optimizing their cloud infrastructure for scalability, task automation, and peak performance.

Introduction of third-party reliance & multi-cloud complexity

Due to this absence of functionality, their internal team had to integrate third-party services into the system. This dependency on third-party solutions gave rise to security concerns and imposed additional time and effort expenditure.

Moreover, the GCP-based ERP systems were interconnected to other enterprise systems on AWS. However, this multi-cloud configuration, rather than a strategic maneuver to enhance infrastructure resiliency or foster innovation, only compounded the intricacy faced by its users.

Solution

GCP-to-AWS Migration

Following an assessment of AWS and GCP, our team at Rikkeisoft concluded that AWS offered more budget-friendly cloud subscription costs with all the necessary features. Furthermore, by substituting third-party solutions with cloud-native services, along with transitioning from a multi-cloud to a single-cloud environment, the client could streamline their integration process. This enabled their internal cloud engineers to build a leaner, more high-performing infrastructure.

As a result, we achieved significant improvements in scalability, availability, and automation by incorporating AWS-native services, including AWS Transfer Family Server, AWS Step Function, Event Bridge, AWS ECS Fargate, into the architecture.

For 3 supermarket chains

0 ERP

Business-critical apps migrated & newly built

Reduction in annual cloud maintenance fee

$ 0

Result

Rikkeisoft successfully migrated 3 ERP systems, encompassing 5 business-critical apps, from GCP to AWS. The migration has remarkably reduced their cloud operations fee by $70,000 annually and improved the systems’ overall performance.