Global E-commerce Ordering Platform
The Challenge
Gordon Food Service serves over 100,000 customers across North America: restaurants, healthcare facilities, schools, and more. Their legacy ordering system was a monolith tied to mainframe-era infrastructure. It worked, but it couldn’t keep up. Deployments happened four times a year. Feature requests sat in queues for months. The platform that powered a billion-dollar distribution business was becoming the bottleneck.
I came into this engagement as a Technical Principal, leading the product architecture for the new ordering platform. This was the next chapter after spending years building the cloud infrastructure (ICDS) that made this modernization possible. I went from laying the foundation to building on top of it.
What I Built
- Microservices Migration: Led the refactoring of legacy business logic into containerized services running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Decomposed the monolith into domain-driven services that teams could own and deploy independently.
- Data Integration: Built high-performance ingestion layers to sync real-time product availability from mainframe systems to the digital storefront. The ordering system needed to reflect live inventory across distribution centers. Stale data meant lost orders.
- Reliability: Implemented advanced caching strategies and circuit breakers to ensure zero-downtime during peak ordering windows. For a food distributor, system outages don’t just cost revenue, they disrupt supply chains.
Key Outcomes
- Deployment velocity: From 4 releases per year to 2,920. Multiple deployments per day became routine.
- Speed to value: Feature requests went from months-long backlogs to production in under 24 hours.
- Reliability: Zero customer-facing downtime through the entire migration and beyond.
- Scale: The platform supported 100,000+ B2B customers with a mobile-first ordering experience, driving record digital sales during global supply chain disruptions.
- Canada expansion: The platform’s adoption metrics directly supported GFS’s growth, going from a 25% to 96% adoption increase in Canada.
Recognition
This work was featured as an official Google Cloud Customer Story, highlighting the transformation as a reference architecture for enterprise modernization on GCP.
“We went from four releases a year to multiple releases a day. That’s not just a technology change, that’s a culture change.”
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