B2B Merchandise Platform

From monolith to microservices for a retail platform

Upgrading your live platform on a legacy monolithic architecture is too risky without causing a major outage. However, your deployments are slow, and scaling for peak traffic is a constant challenge. So how do you migrate to a new infrastructure while maintaining 100% uptime?

sales@itsyndicate.org

Architecture for speed and scale

As a B2B platform specializing in custom-branded merchandise, the client required an infrastructure capable of scaling with their expanding customer base and supporting rapid development. Their legacy monolithic setup, which relied on standalone EC2 instances, became a bottleneck. This limitation hindered scalability, slowed down work, and exposed security gaps.

Quick facts

B2B Retail platform

Amongst the fastest-growing US firms

An online B2B platform offers custom-branded merchandise, serving companies of all sizes with seamless ordering, management, and distribution of their mass and retail orders.

See their feedback

Zero or

No downtime deployments achieved

Implementing CI/CD pipelines with automated testing and Kubernetes infrastructure enabled the development team to deploy features, ensuring uninterrupted service even during peak usage periods.

The best couple
AWS + k8s

By migrating from a monolithic to a microservices architecture and implementing self-hosted CI runners, we accelerated our release schedule and increased our uptime to 99.9%.

“Their expertise in Kubernetes, CI/CD automation, and security solutions, combined with their excellent track record, made them the ideal choice for our project.”

Executive

Custom Ink

What we did for Custom Ink

Modernization & infrastructure automation

For our client, this was a complete infrastructure transformation executed on a live, revenue-generating platform. They needed to move to a modern, containerized environment that would allow their teams to ship features faster and handle traffic spikes with ease, all without disrupting their ongoing business operations. So we decided to:

Migrate to a Kubernetes-based architecture: We migrated the platform from standalone EC2 instances to a fully containerized environment orchestrated by Kubernetes. By implementing dynamic development environments, we enabled developers to spin up isolated testing spaces on demand, dramatically accelerating development cycles and reducing conflicts.
Optimize CI/CD for zero-downtime deployments: We rebuilt the deployment pipeline using self-hosted CircleCI runners and the Gitflow methodology. The new pipeline includes automated testing and zero-downtime deployment strategies, enabling the team to ship features faster and with complete confidence, knowing that releases will not interrupt the user experience.

Security hardening & 24/7 monitoring

Modernizing the stack is only half the battle - the new platform must be secure and reliable. We needed to harden the environment against threats and establish deep visibility to ensure that the high availability their customers depend on is maintained 24/7. So we proceeded to:

Implementing enterprise-grade security: We hardened security across the entire stack. This included deploying a Web Application Firewall, implementing end-to-end data encryption, migrating databases to managed services for high availability, and restricting access to sensitive staging environments via VPN.
Establishing 24/7 observability & support: To guarantee operational excellence, we deployed a comprehensive monitoring stack using Grafana,
Prometheus and ELK. Our on-call support team uses this real-time data to detect and resolve critical issues proactively, maintaining the high availability that is essential for a leading retail platform.

Modernization with platform engineering: FAQ

How do you stop teams from fighting over staging environments?

By eliminating them.

We implement ephemeral environments for each feature branch, allowing teams to test modifications in complete isolation with production-like configurations.

This ends resource competition, makes QA more efficient, and dramatically reduces integration issues.

How do you prove our disaster recovery plan actually works?

By turning the paper plan into a practiced capability.

We define clear RPO/RTO targets, implement automated backups, and conduct regular, hands-on restoration drills.

These rehearsals validate the entire recovery path, ensuring the process is effective and familiar in a real emergency.

How do you prepare our site for major traffic spikes?

By stress-testing critical paths before they become a problem.

We proactively analyze workloads, optimize services like Nginx, and fine-tune autoscaling policies (HPA/VPA).

This creates predictable performance and sufficient headroom to handle seasonal traffic without degrading the user experience.

How do you fix our team's "alert fatigue" problem?

By focusing on actionable alerts tied to business impact, not just system noise.

We track "golden signals" (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) against Service Level Objectives (SLOs).

When an alert fires, it includes a detailed runbook, enabling quick root cause analysis and reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

How can we meet audit requirements without manual reporting?

By creating an automatic, auditable trail from your existing workflow.

Version-controlled infrastructure plans from Terraform, CI/CD pipeline logs, and system access histories provide a complete and immutable record of every action, streamlining both internal reviews and external assessments.

We’d love to hear from you

Ready to upgrade your infrastructure without losing revenue?

Talk to our team about your needs.