Delivering Agility at Scale: E-Commerce Transformation on GCP
Context
An international group, a leader in plant-based cosmetics with more than €2 billion in annual revenue, wanted to modernize its e-commerce platform by moving to the Cloud.
The objective: to deliver a seamless online experience to millions of customers, while reducing maintenance costs and gaining agility.
The company decided to migrate its SAP Hybris–based website to a new architecture deployed on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), covering 19 European countries.
Two major challenges:
- Moving from a monthly release cycle to a weekly or even daily delivery cadence.
- Effortlessly absorbing traffic peaks during marketing campaigns and commercial events (e.g., Black Friday, product launches).
Accomplishment
The transformation was built on four key pillars:
- Cloud migration: from a monolithic architecture running on a VMWare on-premise infrastructure to a microservices-based architecture on GCP, ensuring resilience, scalability, and cost reduction (migrating from 100+ VMs to 1000+ containers).
- Deployment industrialization: implementation of CI/CD pipelines enabling faster and more reliable deliveries.
- Scalability and availability:
- Introduction of horizontal scaling to absorb traffic peaks.
- Adoption of blue/green deployments to ensure zero-downtime releases.
- Team coaching and DevOps culture: beyond technology, the project represented a true organizational shift, with the adoption of a DevOps mindset and significant upskilling of local teams (100+ developers, QA engineers, and webmasters).
Outcome
In less than 12 months of migration, the benefits were immediate and measurable:
✅ Increased availability: zero downtime during deployments (compared to more than 4 hours previously).
✅ Enhanced agility: multiple weekly daytime releases, replacing the former monthly cycle with overnight downtime.
✅ Business performance: the platform now easily handles traffic peaks, leading to higher conversion rates and improved customer satisfaction.
✅ Cost optimization: the cloud migration reduced infrastructure maintenance costs while increasing financial flexibility.
By unifying its infrastructure in the cloud and accelerating its delivery processes, the group achieved significant gains in time-to-market, resilience, and digital competitiveness.
Written by Jean-Philippe ROBBE, jprobbe@penonpartners.com Practice Leader – IT Operations Excellence at Penon Partners
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