Northwind runs a regional retail chain whose ordering, inventory and loyalty systems had grown up on servers under a desk — literally. Hardware failures were cutting into trading hours, and nobody could say which version of the truth any report showed.
Northwind Cloud Migration
Retail · Cloud Migration · 14 weeks, zero downtime through peak season.
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Project Overview
Forty Services, One Calm Move
ClientNorthwind Retail Group
ServicesCloud migration, QA, 24/7 support
Timeline14 weeks, phased by department
The Challenge
Peak Season Was Non-Negotiable
The migration window overlapped the busiest trading quarter. Any outage during ordering hours meant lost sales and empty shelves — so a big-bang cutover was off the table from day one.
- Undocumented services with hidden dependencies between stores
- Nightly batch jobs nobody dared to touch or reschedule
- Staff who needed training without closing a single till
Approach & Solution
Migrate in the Open, Verify Everything
We moved one department at a time behind parallel infrastructure, replaying real traffic against the new stack before each cutover. Automated checks compared old and new outputs nightly, and every store manager got a one-page rollback card they never needed to use.
Training ran in short floor-side sessions between shifts, and our support line shadowed the client's team for the first month live.
Project Gallery
Inside the Migration
Results & Outcome
Trading Through the Whole Move
Every cutover landed inside its overnight window. Ordering stayed up through the entire quarter, month-end reports now reconcile the same day, and the client's team handles routine changes without calling us.