> cat enterprise_cloud_enablement_&_icds.md

Enterprise Cloud Enablement & ICDS

[DATE] 2020-02-01

The Challenge

Gordon Food Service is one of the largest foodservice distributors in North America, serving roughly 100,000 customers across the US and Canada. As GFS moved to the cloud, the challenge was twofold: standardizing how dozens of product teams provisioned and deployed infrastructure, and consolidating fragmented data sources that teams had been duplicating independently for core financial workflows.

I joined as a Senior Technical Principal leading both the cloud enablement strategy and the data modernization effort.

What I Built

Cloud Enablement

Infrastructure as Code: Developed a comprehensive library of Terraform modules to standardize the deployment of GKE clusters, VPC networks, and Cloud SQL instances. These modules became the building blocks that every team used, ensuring consistency without limiting flexibility.
Standardized Pipelines: Built reusable CI/CD templates that integrated security scanning and automated testing into every deployment. Teams didn’t have to think about compliance. It was already in the pipeline.
Self-Service Provisioning: Established repeatable patterns and infrastructure modules that gave product teams self-service capabilities while enforcing organizational compliance, security, and budgetary guardrails across GitLab, SonarCloud, NexusIQ, and Apigee.

ICDS (Integrated Consumption Data Store)

Data Normalization: Consolidated fragmented data sources into a centralized BigQuery repository using Dataflow batch pipelines, replacing multiple one-off data duplication patterns that teams had come to rely on for core financial workflows.
Domain Access API Layer: Built a standardized API layer deployed on GKE to provide consistent, governed access to the consolidated data, eliminating the need for teams to maintain their own data copies and dependencies.

Key Outcomes

Reduced environment provisioning time from weeks to minutes.
Ensured 100% compliance with corporate security standards through automated guardrails.
Drove a 20% increase in users ordering 90%+ of their volume online. The infrastructure directly enabled the digital experience.
The platform became the foundation for the GFS Ordering Platform, the next phase of the engagement where we built the product that ran on top of this infrastructure.

The Bigger Picture