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The strategy behind RELEX's migration to KubernetesDeveloper Platform

RELEX Solutions is a leading provider of cutting-edge retail optimization software. Their cloud-native Living Retail Platform delivers pragmatic AI across all retail functions to optimize demand forecasting, inventory, space, workforce, promotions and markdowns at retail scale. Their 250+ customers include leading brands such as AutoZone, Morrisons, PetSmart and Rossmann. RELEX has offices across North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region.
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Starting point

Needing to ease operations and enable a much higher degree of automation, RELEX wanted to know if it would be possible to migrate their application to run on some orchestration platform instead of a traditional server environment.

"We have successfully collaborated on Azure Kubernetes projects before, so we have great trust in Polar Squad. That's why we turned to them for this project as well." - Ville Hämäläinen, Chief Technology Officer

Solution

Through us, RELEX got highly-skilled Kubernetes professionals with high technical expertise, long experience, vision, and understanding of the bigger picture. Our consultant Risto Laurikainen started with a pre-study of available options for orchestration platforms and their pros and cons from the point of view of the requirements of the RELEX software.

The pre-study also involved significant architectural planning to determine how RELEX could run the application on Kubernetes. Based on this pre-study, RELEX chose Kubernetes as the tool of choice for orchestration and started an initiative to migrate the application. After the pre-study, we continued architecting this initiative.

In addition to figuring out the technical details of the migration, it has also been essential to think about how to upskill current employees and familiarize them with the new architecture in a way relevant to their specific roles. The number of people involved with the new architecture is large, so an appropriate approach was required.

Results

The migration is currently underway with a clear goal and a path forward. Overall, we see that the key to these types of migrations is an insight into the customer’s needs and the unique challenges created by their current software architecture, paired with a deep understanding of the platform, Kubernetes. This ensures that the migration not only meets technical specifications but also aligns perfectly with RELEX’s business objectives.

The new architecture brings many benefits. It raises the level of automation, making the software easier to operate. It allows development teams to work more independently, with less dependencies between teams. As RELEX has already widely adopted Kubernetes in the public cloud, using the same tools in the data center allows for better information sharing and collaboration between different parts of the organization. All of this put together is set to make it possible for the business to reach a bigger scale while maintaining high quality.

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