Sainsbury’s ORS Migration

The challenge

Sainsbury’s had been busily migrating its considerable e-commerce platform to the cloud at the same time embracing DevOps, automation and cloud native services. Peripheral to the main catalogue of groceries were a number of smaller yet crucial services that needed to be moved to the cloud platform. These included the Oracle Real-time Scheduling component (ORS).

To fully benefit from the cost reductions that would come with decommissioning hardware and data centres this component needed to be moved into the cloud. This tricky and key component demanded several environments to perform tests within to ensure all the functionality remained in place and performance was not compromised. As ever the business wanted this done swiftly so they could start making improvements to the site.

What we did

A swiftly conducted discovery exercise, carried out by a Dae.mn consultant with experience of the platform, rapidly moved to the implementation of a proof of concept (PoC). Within a week this was providing assurance to the team that the application would work in the cloud.

Given the scale of Sainsbury’s e-commerce operation a carefully thought through data migration and deployment plan was needed. The key parts of this included:

Design a cloud-based architecture using best practice to give a scaleable, flexible, cost effective solution.
Automate the deployment to ensure consistency and repeatability.
Embrace infrastructure as code for quick development and to minimise risk during implementation.
Maximise the cloud’s resource scalability options to meet and exceed the demands of Sainsbury’s grocery business.

Outcome and results

The success of this project provided numerous benefits to Sainsbury’s including:

Increased performance with network calls not having to traverse between cloud and datacentre
New and improved monitoring and alerting
Clear visibility of the system status with lower time to resolution of issues
Processes such as user management and the deployment of updates are now fully automated increasing stability, and the speed of adding new features.
Developers now have access to environments as they can now be built out on demand to any scale, from small clusters for functional or integration testing, to production sized systems for performance or investigations by the support team

Together we delivered a successful and seamless migration from the datacentre to the cloud, minimising disruption to business.

The system has been stable with no major defects or incidents since going live. The project allowed Sainsbury’s to reduce their hypercare period, freeing up valuable resources in the immediate post go-live period.

Overall the migration not only resulted in benefits to the digital architecture at Sainsbury’s, but it has also given the business a sound, flexible and testable platform to build on.