Major loyalty program decouples and migrates entire IT platform to AWS

The business challenge:

• When Wesfarmers planned a spin-off of Coles Supermarkets to a separately listed company, the entire Flybuys loyalty program IT platform needed to be separated from running in Coles on-prem datacentre.
• As a new separate entity, Flybuys seized the opportunity to migrate entirely to AWS rather than establishing it’s own on-prem IT facilities.
• As a 24/7 platform linked to dozens of complex retailing systems, the migration needed to be executed with the absolute minimum of downtime.

The technical challenge:

• Consisting of more than 50 services and a handful of databases exceeding 25Tb, the platform needed to be migrated in waves to AWS while maintaining secure private connections to Coles’ on-prem systems, and a dozen third-party and partner platforms.
• The scale of the platform and integration with Coles’ systems meant that it couldn’t all be moved at once.

The solution:

• Execute a lift-and-shift migration and recreate the on-prem infrastructure on AWS.
• To support a migration of services to AWS in waves, a unique secure private network connection by proxy was created so applications on AWS could call Coles’ on -prem systems.
• Shine’s engineers developed microservices to handle requests via an API gateway.
• Agile and DevOps processes were implemented, including automated infrastructure and application deployment pipelines using AWS CloudFront.

The benefits:

• Successful complete migration to AWS without interruption to the business.
• Immediate ability to spin up servers on demand, and introduced auto-scaling to handle peak demand.
• Improved redundancy and disaster recovery capability.
• Gained complete operational control of IT platforms, with better monitoring of systems and usage, and control of changes.
• Established a development culture based on Agile and DevOps principles.
• Positioned Flybuys to be able to rearchitect platforms to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities.