Coles accelerates app builds with Azure partner Azenix

Microsoft partner, Mantel Group's Azenix, helped Coles optimise its Azure development environment to significantly accelerate application build times and deployments.

Coles leveraged Microsoft Azure to quickly roll out updates to its ecommerce platform in line with rapidly changing customer needs.

Azenix was tapped by Coles to enhance its Azure DevOps development pipelines.

The company reviewed current pipeline status and structure, provided analysis and created custom build services, which reduced build time from hours down to 10 or 15 minutes.

Azenix also shared knowledge through brown bags and other sessions to upskill Coles' development and engineering teams.

“[Azenix] understood the Microsoft service set well. They hit the ground running, really to be able to plug in some of the gaps we had.”  

“Instead of doing six-week releases, we now do weekly releases."

"And the build times now take roughly 10 to 15 minutes, compared to what used to be a couple of hours.” said Coles' senior engineering manager for web Patrik Mihailescu.

“We’re going to be moving to daily deployments in the next six to nine months and definitely with the Azure tooling, that’s going to be super key in enabling us to go even quicker.”

Powering DevOps with Microsoft's AI

Coles is also using Microsoft's data and AI capabilities to address customer needs, including to predict demand for products at specific stores and times.

“Our entire supply chain is being driven through a machine learning engine. So it is giving insight at a super localised level."

"We’re also using it to ensure that we are scheduling our team members based on customer demand and making sure we keep the shelves stocked appropriately,” Coles' chief technology officer John Cox said.

The customer experience is further optimised through the use of Azure Cosmos DB, which provides an aggregated view across channels to enable further customer insights.

Deploying updates during peak periods

Azure has enabled Coles to efficiently test and deploy updates during peak shopping periods, without causing disruption for customers.

“Azure DevOps tooling definitely enabled us to be able to rapidly deploy changes to production by allowing us to safely create changes, to test those independently before they were merged into our master branch…and to create rapid pipelines,” Mihailescu said.

“We deploy during our peak periods where customers are on the site, but through the work that we’ve done we have zero downtime. There is no impact to our customers.” 

Coles also uses Azure API Management gateway to ensure secure online payment and processing for online shoppers by identifying, blocking and countering fraudulent activity and bot attempts to enter the site.

“If a customer provides feedback that they’re having challenges with checking out, we can really drill-in with confidence and identify what range of issues they might be experiencing and then plan around how to remediate that,” Coles' senior engineering manager Benedict Lowndes said.

“I’ve found Azure an incredibly accessible but powerful toolkit that we can tap into to ensure that we are on top of customer issues.”