Case Study Spotlight:
Industry: Consumer Products / Omnichannel Commerce
Region: Global
Solutions: Cloud Migration, Application Modernization, Managed Services
AWS Partner: An AWS Consulting Partner specializing in migration and modernization
About the Customer:
The customer is a global consumer brand focused on household cleaning systems and consumables. Products are sold through major retailers, online marketplaces, and a growing direct to consumer channel.
Core systems that support digital commerce, product registration, promotions, and customer service were hosted in a mix of on premises and third party environments. The applications were tightly coupled and built up over many years, which made it hard to keep pace with new digital expectations from retailers and end customers.
01 The Challenge:
Initech and the customer started by looking at how the existing platforms supported the customer journey from product discovery through ownership. Several issues stood out:
- Monolithic .NET applications struggled to scale predictably during seasonal demand, major promotions, and product launches.
- Release processes for new offers, promotions, and content involved many manual steps and coordination across teams.
- The cost of running legacy infrastructure and database platforms was increasing, and there was no straightforward way to right size capacity.
- Security and operational practices varied by environment and region, which complicated audits and incident response.
The joint objective was to move the most critical workloads to AWS in a way that reduced operational risk, improved scalability, and created clearer building blocks for future digital initiatives such as new commerce features and owner services.
02 The Solution:
Initech worked with the customer’s architecture, application, and operations teams to design a staged migration of key commerce and customer platforms to AWS.
The teams first established a multi account AWS landing zone that standardized identity, network patterns, and security controls. Environments for development, testing, and production were created using infrastructure as code so they could be reproduced and updated consistently.
Workloads were grouped into waves based on business impact and technical complexity. For order processing, product registration, and related services, the teams used a mix of approaches:
- Rehost of some application servers to Amazon EC2 to meet data center exit timelines.
- Replatform and refactor of selected services onto containers running on Amazon EKS and AWS Fargate to improve scalability and deployment flexibility.
Public and partner facing capabilities were fronted by Amazon API Gateway to provide stable endpoints for web, mobile, and partner integrations as the back end services evolved. CI and CD pipelines were implemented to automate build, test, and deployment flows, using AWS services integrated with the customer’s existing tooling.
For operations, the teams built a shared monitoring model using Amazon CloudWatch for metrics, logs, and alarms. Backup, recovery, and change management practices were defined jointly and implemented using native AWS capabilities.
03 The Outcomes:
Once the migration waves were completed, the customer saw practical changes in how the platform behaved and how teams delivered work:
- Commerce and registration workloads handled promotional and seasonal peaks more reliably, with less manual tuning.
- Changes to promotions, pricing rules, and customer workflows moved through standardized pipelines, reducing the lead time and risk associated with releases.
- Infrastructure and database costs became easier to manage due to right sized compute and increased use of managed AWS services.
- Security and operational controls were applied consistently across accounts, which simplified reviews with internal and external stakeholders.
The AWS foundation now supports ongoing refactoring of remaining workloads and gives product and engineering teams more flexibility to design new digital experiences for customers and retail partners.
