Enterprise Retail
Automating point-of-sale infrastructure for 15,000 edge devices.
A leading European retail group needed to operate 15,000 point-of-sale terminals reliably across 15 countries. We automated the cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and configuration management — replacing fragile manual processes with end-to-end ownership at scale.
- Scale
- 40,000 employees, 15,000 devices, 15 countries
- Tech Stack
- Google Cloud (GKE)TerraformGitLab CIAWX/AnsibleKotlinSpring BootRESTNextJS
Challenge
Scale vs. Manual Operations
A leading European retail group needed to manage point-of-sale (POS) infrastructure across roughly 15,000 in-store cash registers in 15 countries. While the engineering teams were individually strong, they lacked the automation to operate reliably at this massive scale.
- Manual interventions: Configuration changes were slow, and deployments relied heavily on manual, error-prone steps.
- Siloed knowledge: Cross-country coordination depended almost entirely on local knowledge rather than standardized processes.
- Architectural friction: Seamlessly connecting the central enterprise ERP system with thousands of decentralized edge devices created immense integration headaches.
Approach
Engineering & Alignment
We worked directly within the infrastructure and engineering teams to automate the cloud infrastructure, build deployment pipelines, and establish sustainable processes for large-scale operations.
Technical Execution
- Cloud Infrastructure: Managed Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters autonomously using Terraform and GitLab CI.
- Edge Automation: Implemented AWX/Ansible pipelines to seamlessly roll out shared components (JDK, databases, monitoring, log shippers) across all 15,000 edge devices.
- Service Engineering: Developed a core Kotlin/Spring Boot service connecting the central ERP system with local POS registers via REST and NextJS UI for configuration.
Aligning the Organization
- Dialogue-Driven Consensus: The company operated on a consensus model—rare at this scale—where every stakeholder's perspective is heard. We engaged across teams, built shared understanding, and from that, decided autonomously what to build and how.
- True Ownership: As integrated team members, we fostered a hands-on engineering mentality, supported recruiting by evaluating technical candidates, and focused on consistently taking true end-to-end responsibility for our systems.
Outcome
Standardized, High-Speed Delivery
We successfully established a highly automated infrastructure serving approximately 15,000 devices across 15 countries. By providing modern operational tooling and shared components, our engineering team was empowered to take full end-to-end ownership of its systems.
15,000
devices on a single automated infrastructure
0
manual deployment steps
Accelerated
Time-to-Market
Sebastian Thees
Founder & Principal Engineer
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