Ahold Delhaize · Food Retail & Integration
Distributed platform on Kotlin Spring Boot and Azure, with dozens of external integrations, always available, built to not break.
The Client
Ahold Delhaize is one of the world's largest food retail groups, headquartered in Zaandam, the Netherlands. They operate over 7,600 stores across Europe and the United States under brands like Albert Heijn, Delhaize, Food Lion, and Stop & Shop, serving tens of millions of customers weekly.
Headquarters
Zaandam, NL
Stores
7,600+
The Challenge
Integrate dozens of systems, stay always-on.
Ahold's platform had to talk to dozens of external systems (suppliers, logistics, payment providers, government APIs), each with its own protocols, formats, and reliability quirks. The system needed to stay available even when third parties went down, handle retries and transformations cleanly, and scale across multiple brands and regions. On top of that, everything had to be observable, traceable, and deployable without downtime.
99.9% platform availability across multiple brands and regions.
The Solution
A resilient integration backbone.
We built a distributed Kotlin Spring Boot platform on Azure with Apache Camel handling the integration layer. Camel routes manage message transformation, protocol bridging, and retry logic across all external systems. Kafka ties the internal services together with guaranteed delivery. Kubernetes on AKS keeps everything scaled and self-healing, while Terraform makes the infrastructure reproducible across environments.
Technology Stack
Kotlin Spring Boot on Azure, Apache Camel for external integrations, Kafka for internal events, all orchestrated on Kubernetes and reproducible with Terraform.
Kotlin Spring Boot
Kotlin on Spring Boot gives us the ecosystem maturity we need (dependency injection, transaction management, security) without the Java verbosity. We use coroutines where it makes sense and keep services small and focused. Each microservice owns its domain and exposes clean APIs.
Results & Impact
Outcomes that stay online.
- Dozens of external integrations running reliably through Camel routes with automatic retries
- 99.9% platform availability across multiple brands and regions
- Kafka processing millions of events daily across orders, inventory, and payments
- Zero-downtime deployments across all services
- Full observability with distributed tracing on every request and message
- New third-party integrations onboarded in days instead of weeks
99.9%
Platform availability
Dozens
External integrations
Days
To onboard new integrations
Complex integrations? We've done it.
Distributed platforms, third-party integrations, always-on reliability. Let's talk about what you're building.