Client overview
A large retail enterprise operates a business-critical digital platform supporting customer-facing and internal services across multiple business domains.
The platform combines cloud-native applications, event-driven services, legacy systems, enterprise integrations, and cloud infrastructure running on AWS. Its technology landscape includes applications hosted on Amazon EKS, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Redis, Kafka, and enterprise integrations supporting digital commerce and business operations.
Intellias partnered with the client to modernize and continuously support its AWS-based digital platform. Alongside cloud modernization initiatives, Intellias provides ongoing managed services across the AWS environment, combining cloud infrastructure operations, monitoring, DevOps, security, and continuous optimization to maintain platform reliability and operational efficiency.
Business challenge
The client was modernizing a large-scale digital platform that had evolved over many years across multiple technologies, environments, and integration patterns.
Several strategic initiatives needed to progress simultaneously while maintaining platform stability, minimizing business disruption, and preparing the environment for future growth.
The key challenges included:
- Migrating event-streaming workloads from self-managed Kafka infrastructure to Confluent Cloud on AWS.
- Consolidating Finance and Digital environments into a unified development and testing platform.
- Reducing operational complexity across cloud infrastructure.
- Modernizing legacy applications that no longer met current security standards.
- Strengthening vulnerability management and authentication.
- Preserving observability, platform reliability, and release quality throughout large-scale infrastructure changes.
The client required an experienced AWS partner capable of delivering complex modernization initiatives while also providing ongoing operational support for the AWS environment. Beyond implementing platform changes, the client needed continuous monitoring, infrastructure operations, incident response, security management, and optimization to maintain the reliability and performance of business-critical services.
Technology solution
Intellias delivered several connected cloud modernization initiatives designed to improve scalability, resilience, security, and operational efficiency across the client’s AWS platform.
The engagement included:
- Migration of Kafka workloads from self-managed infrastructure to Confluent Cloud.
- Cloud networking modernization.
- Migration planning and execution.
- Platform observability improvements.
- Infrastructure optimization.
- Security remediation.
- Legacy application modernization.
- Consolidation of development and testing environments.
Event streaming modernization
The engagement began with a proof of concept validating Confluent Cloud as the target managed event-streaming platform.
The team evaluated network architecture, cluster configuration, access management, application connectivity, observability, performance, security, and infrastructure costs before executing the production migration.
Production workloads were migrated from self-managed Kafka infrastructure to Confluent Cloud, including Kafka topics, schemas, platform applications, and supporting integrations.
The migration was delivered in controlled phases, incorporating validation, reconciliation, recovery planning, and application testing to minimize operational risk while maintaining platform reliability.
Development and testing environment consolidation
To improve software delivery, Intellias designed and implemented a unified development and testing environment that brought together Finance and Digital platform components.
The engagement included:
- Migration of Kafka testing data.
- Migration of Amazon RDS, Redis, Amazon S3, and SFTP services.
- Migration and repointing of Oracle and third-party integrations.
- Backup, reconciliation, and recovery planning.
- Alignment with the client’s deployment strategy and testing processes.
The consolidated environment reduced duplicated infrastructure, streamlined release validation, improved infrastructure utilization, and enabled more predictable software delivery.
Security modernization
As part of the broader cloud transformation, Intellias modernized selected legacy applications to improve maintainability and strengthen the overall security posture.
The engagement included:
- Modernization of legacy applications into digital microservices.
- Implementation of automated security scanning.
- Remediation of critical and high-severity vulnerabilities.
- Strengthening authentication and authorization using Keycloak.
- Reuse of standardized GitLab CI/CD pipelines.
These improvements enhanced platform security while reducing technical debt and improving long-term maintainability.
AWS Managed Services
Beyond the modernization initiatives, Intellias provides ongoing managed services for the client’s AWS environment, supporting the day-to-day operation, reliability, security, and continuous improvement of the platform.
The managed services scope includes:
- Continuous monitoring and observability across AWS infrastructure and workloads
- Incident detection, troubleshooting, response, and escalation
- Day-to-day AWS infrastructure and platform operations
- Infrastructure maintenance and configuration management
- Security monitoring and vulnerability remediation
- DevOps and CI/CD support
- Infrastructure and operational automation
- Performance and resource optimization
- Ongoing platform improvements
Intellias works closely with the client’s architecture, infrastructure, and product teams to maintain platform stability, respond to operational issues, and continuously improve the AWS environment as business and technology requirements evolve.
AWS technology stack
| Layer | Technologies |
|---|---|
| Compute | Amazon EKS |
| Databases & Caching | Amazon RDS, Redis |
| Storage | Amazon S3, SFTP |
| Networking | Amazon VPC, VPC Peering, AWS Transit Gateway |
| Event Streaming | Confluent Cloud, Apache Kafka, Schema Registry, Cluster Linking |
| Security | Keycloak, Automated Security Scanning, Vulnerability Remediation |
| DevOps | GitLab CI/CD |
| Integration | Oracle, Enterprise Integrations |
| Observability |
Monitoring, Alerting, Kafka Observability |
Team contribution
Intellias provides cloud engineering, platform modernization, and ongoing managed services for the client’s AWS environment.
The team supports:
- AWS infrastructure and platform operations
- Monitoring and observability
- Incident management and troubleshooting
- Cloud architecture and modernization
- Networking and connectivity
- Security remediation
- CI/CD and DevOps
- Infrastructure optimization
- Environment management
- Continuous platform improvement
Working closely with the client’s architecture, infrastructure, and product teams, Intellias combines ongoing operational responsibility with continuous platform modernization to maintain a secure, reliable, and scalable AWS environment.
Business impact
The engagement combines ongoing AWS managed services with continuous platform modernization, providing the client with a stable operational foundation while enabling the AWS environment to evolve with changing business requirements.
Key outcomes include:
- Ongoing operational support for the client’s business-critical AWS environment
- Improved platform reliability, scalability, and resilience
- Successful migration from self-managed Kafka infrastructure to Confluent Cloud
- Enhanced security through vulnerability remediation and stronger authentication controls
- Modernized legacy applications with improved maintainability
- Consolidated development and testing environments supporting more efficient software delivery
- Improved infrastructure utilization and operational efficiency
- Continuous improvement of the AWS platform through monitoring, automation, and optimization