Application modernization with Kubernetes at Americanas S.A.

Reducing operational costs, increasing agility in deploying new projects, and improving customer experience are some of the advantages that justify application modernization in companies seeking to stand out in the digital medium.

However, this update to cloud computing is a journey that implies reflecting on a series of criteria that can impact the business. The level of criticality of the applications, the company's culture and goals, prior alignment between the company's areas, financial availability, and workforce qualifications are some of them.

Kubernetes, the key to application modernization

Once these issues are settled, Kubernetes, an open-source technology for containerized application orchestration, is a strategic cornerstone for companies to achieve high levels of efficiency with application modernization.

The platform's benefits — the standardization of infrastructure use to support multi-cloud strategies, the high level of automation for unparalleled efficiency in operations, the self-service infrastructure format that allows greater agility and autonomy for development teams, the more efficient consumption of infrastructure that brings cost reduction, and the easy scaling to keep up with user growth or seasonal peaks — make it the right choice.

To understand how retail companies work on their application modernization initiatives and how Kubernetes facilitates this movement, Getup spoke with Armando Reis, IT Manager at Americanas S.A, one of the largest technological innovation platforms in the country.

SCENARIO

In 2014, Americanas S.A., one of the largest technological innovation platforms in the country, was already thinking about modernizing its legacy application (Web Loja) for delivering products through online orders in physical stores, focusing on increasing volume. Three years later, the company began investing in its journey to cloud computing, and the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 thoroughly accelerated this transformation. With Getup's support for Kubernetes, the company managed to migrate its main monolithic application to the cloud, using native Kubernetes resources.

CHALLENGE

During Easter 2020, when Brazil was facing the most critical phase of pandemic restrictions, the company transitioned from handling an O2O (online to offline) order demand of four thousand orders/day to 42 thousand orders/day.

SOLUTION

As a result, they broke down the monolithic application into microservices and, by Black Friday of that same year, were transacting 100% of the operation on a new platform (Maestro), using native Kubernetes resources.

In the midst of this challenge, Americanas S.A. hired Getup to support them on both the strategic and operational fronts with their expertise in Kubernetes.

RESULTS

Currently, the company has 95% of its applications in the cloud, and according to Armando Reis, IT Manager at Americanas S.A., "this brings several advantages, such as autoscaling. We are able to grow and shrink application resources quickly, with lower financial cost." Reis further states that "running applications with Kubernetes gives more speed to the process, greater guarantee that the code will work in a production environment, requires little manual action, and reduces the application development lifecycle time and machine costs." Regarding Getup, a business partner, Armando believes there is great added value, since it "brings best practices in Kubernetes, has a very strong policy of recommending limits in microservices, for example. It is a company that empowers us, ensuring we also have the autonomy to operate the platform."