KO TECHNOLOGIES
AN ELEVATE & INNOVATE MIGRATION
or Wickes, achieving full digital autonomy during their massive corporate demerger required a strategic overhaul, not just a cloud relocation. KO Technologies delivered an Elevate & Innovate Migration that went beyond lift-and-shift to transform the entire IT estate. We established a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) and implemented an immutable platform using HashiCorp Terraform. This resulted in zero-downtime deployments and cut the time to production by an impressive 75%, securing Wickes’ future as a standalone, technology-driven retail leader.
Official Partner
The Client
Wickes.co.uk is the digital storefront for Wickes Group plc, a leading, digitally-led British home improvement retailer. Specializing in everything from building materials and trade supplies to kitchens, bathrooms, and DIY essentials, Wickes serves three core customer segments: Local Trade, Design & Installation, and DIY Retail. Operating from over 230 stores, the brand is known for its multi-channel approach, allowing customers to shop seamlessly online for Click & Collect or home delivery.
Name
Wickes Building Supplies ltd
Turnover
£1.5 Billion per annum
Location
United Kingdom
KO Technologies delivered a modern migration that immediately supercharged our ability to innovate. We’re now moving faster than ever—while significantly reducing operational costs.
Jon Higgins
Founder of Wickes
Challenges
- Corporate Demerger: Executing a massive demerger program to transition Wickes into a fully stand-alone business entity.
- Infrastructure Autonomy: Technically separating all application infrastructure from the parent company's hosted data center and building a completely new, independent IT capability for Wickes.
- Create a secure multi account AWS cloud: Due to the complexity and business units, many AWS accounts are required.
- Platform Modernization: Establishing platform parity first, and then immediately embarking on continuous improvement and a comprehensive DevOps transformation.
- Automation & Code First: Reduce operational overhead and increase automation to supercharge the business.
- Maintain service level uptime when migrating: A challenge to keep business continuity whilst cutover to new AWS infrastructure.
- Introduce better observability solutions: Replace the existing monitoring solutions with unified cloud observability solutions.
- Introduce better observability solutions: Replace the Citrix solution with a serverless AWS equivalent solution.
- Elevate & Innovation: A cloud first approach to introduce serverless and microservice technologies.
Solutions
- AWS Landing Zones
AWS account structure created using the Terraform Account Factory.
- CCoE Formation
Cloud Centre of Excellence to boost cloud adoption – A key component to a cloud migration – we helped create a platform and capability to drive innovation.
- eCommerce platform
An innovative auto scaling eCommerce infrastructure solution which leverages HashiCorp Packer built Hybris AMI’s, released using Terraform & Jenkins CICD.
- Microservices platform
A HashiCorp Nomad based microservices platform to deploy the next gen application to.
- Digital Workplaces
AppStream and Workspaces to enhance security and make it easier for business users to access private systems.
- Next Gen Firewall
Palo Alto Firewall deployment. We created a secure network to allow client VPN and cross VPC access.
- Datadog Observability
Introduced the three pillars of observability to eCommerce and Microservices to enhance service levels and finely tune applications to meet the demands of an elastic scaling business.
- Architecture diagrams
Introduced Cloudcraft to save time with creating architecture diagrams.
Results
Speed to innovations is vastly reduced by delivering a modern migration to AWS. We have reduced time to market by 75% by deploying high impact automation.
Teams collaborate seamlessly with the unified Tools and enhanced Devops Techniques.
Modern scalable infrastructure, rather than static and operational burdened servers.
Enhance Observability with Datadog – increasing service levels and lowering time to identify problems.
Tools Used
- AWS
- DATADOG
- TERRAFORM
- TERRAGRUNT
- JENKINS
- GITHUB
- GITLAB
- NOMAD
- VAULT
- CONSUL
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