Success Story: Coop
Success Story: Gamaya
9. July 2020
Value Acceleration Session
13. October 2020
Success Story: Coop
Cloud Foundation - Coop relies on Wabion to integrate Google Cloud
With over 90,000 employees in Switzerland and abroad, the Coop Group generates annual sales of around 30 billion Swiss francs. More than 2300 Coop supermarkets and various specialist shop chains are the most important pillar, but international wholesale and production companies also provide important sources of income.
The over 150 year old cooperative with over 2.5 million members resp. customers want to do pioneering work for the retail industry of the future. The combination of brick-and-mortar and online retail plays a crucial role. A flexible, scalable and efficient IT infrastructure is a prerequisite for the success of this cross-channel strategy.
Challenge
As a big player in Swiss retail, business areas such as marketing and sales of the Coop Group are very familiar with Google products such as Google Ads and Google Maps. These departments have also recognized the great potential of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), in particular GCP products for data analytics such as Dataflow and BigQuery. To benefit from GCP, Coop addresses challenges such as:
- How does Coop take the first steps into the cloud?
- How is the Coop-specific use of GCP resp. the establishment of a GCP organization in accordance with the Coop guidelines and budget specifications?
- How can basic configurations of identities, access rights, network, monitoring, cost control and support be used as quickly as possible for first projects in a setup that combines GCP and on-prem?
“Thanks to the Cloud Foundation, we have made a huge leap in innovation. The great cooperation with both Google and Wabion played a central role. Thanks to our capable people, we use Google Cloud very independently – but we can always draw on the expert knowledge of our partners if necessary. Our journey to the cloud has just begun.”
Michel Rodel
IT Systems Technology, Head of Unix Solutions
Solution
Wabion has has guided Coop through a so-called Cloud Foundation, which serves as the basis for the targeted implementation of the Coop cloud strategy. As a leading Google Cloud Premier Partner in German-speaking countries, Wabion has tailored Google Best Practices for the DACH region. The following illustration positions the Cloud Foundation in the so-called “Cloud Enterprise Stack” with its 3 levels and four pillars:
Ultimately, the goal of a Cloud Foundation is to set up a GCP organization in accordance with company-specific guidelines, structures etc., on which GCP products in the technology stack (Compute Engine, BigQuery etc.) and the provided applications are based.
Governance, Security, Accelerators (tools) and Training run through all levels of the Cloud Enterprise Stack and all stages on the way to the Cloud Foundation:
1. Concept
In several workshops, the Google Cloud experts from Wabion worked with the stakeholders at Coop to develop the concepts for the different elements of the Cloud Foundation:
- GCP organization: To structure the specific GCP organization, Coop relies on a hierarchy that includes all applications and environments and uses projects as the smallest logical unit. Administration works according to defined roles (project managers, network managers, security officers etc.).
- Cloud IAM: A matrix divides the roles into authorization groups (“Org Admin,“ Network Admin ”,“ Security Admin ”and“ Billing Admin ”), prioritizing the limitation of access rights at project level for users without overarching tasks.
- Networking: The purpose of Coop GCP network setup is to regulate connections with the Coop on-prem data center, centrally manage network attributes/ settings and implement security measures.
- Monitoring: Coop monitors GCP loads with the GCP tool Stackdriver. Project managers may have extended alerting options – depending on the importance of the project or application.
- Billing: In order to combine decentralized technical responsibility with central cost control, project managers can carry out comprehensive cost-relevant actions on their projects (e.g. create / mutate / stop resources). The superior level always has the information to assign costs accurately.
- Support: GCP offers various customized support models. In the role-based support chosen by Coop, project managers can determine and organize the adequate support model.
2. Execution
The concepts developed with Wabion enabled Coop to tackle the configurations of the company-specific GCP instance. Supported by Wabion, the Coop specialists became familiar with the Google Cloud Console and developed the integration of the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). As a result, Coop developers can build containerized applications on a hybrid platform. Various Coop teams were quick to use GCP for their first productive projects (e.g. in the area of data analytics, see figure above) and benefited from neatly set up Coop GCP organization.
3. Automation
At the end of the Cloud Foundation implementation, the experienced Wabion experts automated the GCP configuration of the Coop organization using Terraform. This easy-to-reproduce setup sets the course for an efficient implementation of the planned projects on GCP.
Benefits
With the successfully implemented Cloud Foundation, the GCP experts from Wabion have created the conditions for Coop to accelerate the journey into Google Cloud:
- Coop now has a compliant GCP environment that is tailored to specific needs. Thanks to the automated configurations, pivotal cloud projects can now follow quickly.
- The Coop-specific GCP organization runs in accordance with company guidelines and is integrated with internal processes such as Network and Billing.
- Thanks to the support from the Wabion experts, the Coop development teams have a hybrid platform to optimally combine the advantages of on-prem and GCP.
Coop speeds up its journey to the cloud – and can draw on Wabion’s expertise at any time if necessary. With a focus on the flexibility, scalability and efficiency of Google Cloud, Coop also sets the standard for Swiss Retail in IT.