UP Coop: Cloud-Native Digital Factory

CASE STUDY · RETAIL & COOPERATIVE

AKS migration and Terraform automation for the UP Group.

A major player in the social and solidarity economy with 7,000 employees, UP built its cloud-native Fabrik Digitale on Azure with Adservio.

Client

UP Coop (social economy · 7,000 employees)

Expertise

Cloud-Native AKS · IaC Terraform · DevOps & Platform

Tech Stack

Azure AKS · Bicep · Terraform · OPA · GitHub Actions

Engagement

5 experts · 24 months

CONTEXT

Project Context

The UP Group operates a service platform that is critical for the social economy (meal vouchers, gift vouchers, mobility). The legacy on-premise infrastructure could no longer support the product pace or the resilience expected by beneficiaries.

Deployments were carried out manually, with a significant operational cost and a long time-to-market. Divergent configurations between environments created incidents that were difficult to diagnose.

The challenge: migrate to cloud-native AKS, industrialise everything as Terraform code, deploy a full GitOps workflow, and embed cloud-native practices durably through an internal Platform Academy.

Strategic Objectives

OBJECTIVES

(01)

Cloud-native AKS

Migrate UP Coop workloads to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with a multi-zone architecture, autoscaling, managed ingress and native monitoring.

(02)

IaC Terraform

Industrialise the infrastructure with Terraform: reusable modules, internal registries, GitOps workflow, drift detection and zero-touch provisioning.

(03)

Platform engineering

Provide UP Coop product teams with a platform engineering capability offering self-service, golden paths and templates to accelerate new services.

Solutions Delivered by Adservio

SOLUTIONS

Adservio deployed a Platform Engineering team (Cloud Architect, Platform Engineers, GitOps specialist, DevOps Coach) over 24 months.

(01)

AKS architecture

Design of a multi-zone AKS cluster (3 AZ) with specialised node pools (general, memory-intensive, GPU for ML), cluster + pod autoscaling, and managed ingress via Application Gateway.

(02)

Terraform modules

Development of 12 internal Terraform modules (AKS, networking, RBAC, monitoring, keyvault, storage), published in a private registry with semantic versioning and automated tests.

(03)

GitOps workflow

Full GitOps workflow with ArgoCD: every infrastructure or application change goes through a PR, is validated by CI/CD, and deployed automatically after merge (zero manual deployment).

(04)

Policy as Code OPA

Policy as Code via OPA + Azure Policy: automatic drift detection, blocking of non-compliant configurations (security, FinOps, networking), and guided remediation for minor deviations.

(05)

Coaching & enablement

Training UP Coop teams in cloud-native practices (Kubernetes, Terraform, GitOps), creation of an internal Platform Academy and support for application migrations.

8 nodes, 3 availability zones,
terraform apply, zero drift.

Multi-zone AKS cluster, versioned Terraform modules, full GitOps via ArgoCD, OPA for the policies: the infrastructure becomes a product, not a project.

Results

MEASURED FIGURES

100%

Terraform IaC

The entire UP Coop infrastructure described and versioned as Terraform code.

×6

Time-to-deploy

New service deployment accelerated, a few hours versus several days.

−24%

Cloud bill

AKS cost reduction over the year through rightsizing and spot instances.

3 AZ

Availability zones

Multi-zone AKS cluster for high availability in production.

Terraform modules

Reusable internal modules published in a versioned private registry.

Drift in production

Zero drift detected over the last 12 months thanks to drift detection.

Impact

WHAT IT CHANGES

Cloud-native AKS

Multi-zone AKS cluster in production, able to host all UP Coop workloads with autoscaling, high availability and zero downtime on rolling upgrades.

100% Terraform IaC

The entire UP Coop infrastructure is now Terraform code, with automatic drift detection and 0 drift in production over the last 12 months.

Time-to-deploy ×6

The deployment time of a new service is divided by 6 thanks to the templates and the GitOps workflow: a few hours versus several days previously.

Controlled FinOps

Continuous optimisation of AKS costs (rightsizing, spot instances, aggressive autoscaling) with a 24% reduction in the cloud bill over the year.

Security by design

Policy as Code OPA + Azure Policy: no non-compliant configuration can reach production, and vulnerabilities are remediated automatically for minor deviations.