Ahold Delhaize
Distributed platform on Kotlin Spring Boot and Azure — dozens of external integrations, always available, built to not break.
About Ahold Delhaize
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.
The Project
Challenge
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.
Solution
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, Camel for integrations, Kafka for events. Click through to see the details.
Kotlin Spring Boot
Azure
Kafka
Apache Camel
Docker
Kubernetes
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
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 — orders, inventory, 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
Complex integrations? We've done it.
Distributed systems, external APIs, high availability — let's talk about your platform.