Kmart, one of Australia's largest retailers, was facing a challenge in its digital transformation journey. Despite having a strong physical presence with 84% of Australians living within 10km of one of its stores, Kmart was keen on investing in its digital business to strengthen its market-leading and personalized omnichannel experience. The company was looking for ways to improve operational efficiencies and deliver greater value for customers by investing in data and technology. In 2020, Kmart commenced a re-platforming process, which included assessing existing infrastructure and systems and sourcing new solutions to support and facilitate its digital evolution. The main goal was to deliver peak performance across online and in-store point of sale (POS) systems, improve system resilience, and enhance customer experience. Additionally, Kmart wanted to improve visibility as the company did not have reliable data about how their website was being accessed, or the purchase journeys their customers were taking.

FARFETCH, a global platform for luxury fashion, faced a significant challenge when Google introduced Core Web Vitals (CWV) in 2020. These user experience metrics became a guiding light for the FARFETCH engineering team, as improving CWV meant that a site would load faster and be easier to interact with. Two of the most important CWVs for FARFETCH were Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures the time it takes to display the largest content on the site, and Time to Interactive (TTI), which measures the time it takes for a site to become fully interactive for the user. The complex architecture of third-party services made it difficult for FARFETCH to identify opportunities for performance improvement.

Indonesia-based healthcare company, Halodoc, was founded in 2016 to address a significant problem in Indonesia: a severe shortage of doctors for its population of over 270 million people. The scarcity of healthcare professionals was further exacerbated by the uneven distribution of doctors across the country. Halodoc's health-tech platform aimed to bridge this gap by connecting patients with licensed doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, insurance providers, and labs through a single platform accessible via mobile or web application. However, the COVID-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented surge in demand for virtual health services. The technology team was faced with the challenge of delivering optimal customer experiences with high uptime and reliability, while managing the increased system load.

ABS-CBN Corporation, a leading media and entertainment organization in the Philippines, was facing challenges in managing its streaming and digital media services. The Philippines, being one of the world’s biggest markets for online and digital media, has a highly competitive market that demands constant innovation and exceptional user experience. ABS-CBN was struggling with a volatile demand from event-driven spikes, such as live election coverage, which required a robust and stable tech stack. The company was using multiple tools for monitoring, error reporting, tracking resources health, and on-premise infrastructure, which created a siloed technology environment. This led to a reactive approach where problems weren’t identified until they had escalated and were impacting end-users. The engineers lacked sufficient information to pinpoint the problems.

Achievers, an award-winning platform for employee recognition and engagement, experienced significant growth over the past two years, serving more than 2,500 brands across over 150 countries. This growth brought about new and increased technical demands, including the need to support a global architecture while maintaining quality and reliability. The company needed to transition from a system of disparate Kubernetes clusters—with no communication between regions—to a single, unified system across the organization’s global footprint. The Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and developers at Achievers faced the complex task of running a multi-region Kubernetes service mesh. Scaling the platform globally and making sense of all the distributed data was a significant challenge. It was difficult to understand what data was needed and how to use this data to solve their problems.

Credit Sense, a platform that enables consumers to safely share their data and connect with services faster, was facing significant challenges in managing its cloud costs and diagnosing problems in its system. The company had developed a comprehensive data aggregation and analysis solution to solve key affordability, compliance, and risk management challenges faced by lenders when assessing customers for credit and other services. However, the company had no monitoring tools in place, which was affecting its ability to manage its Amazon Web Services (AWS) costs and quickly diagnose system issues. This was critically affecting their clients in the finance industry, who relied on Credit Sense for their customer on-boarding process.

Founded in 2015, Getir is an ultrafast delivery pioneer that has expanded its unique business model over time with various services. The company revolutionized last-mile delivery to customers with a 10-minute grocery delivery proposition, offering approximately 2,000 everyday items. Getir is now operating in all 81 cities of Turkey and launched operations in a number of countries in 2021. The company’s tech has enabled it to scale and succeed under the most challenging of circumstances. However, the company's proposition is speed through technology, and the end-to-end delivery process, from order to courier, must be fast and seamless. This requires a robust, cloud-based, integrated technology system that uses data and algorithms to manage supplies and customer demand.

Kogan.com, a leading Australian consumer brand, experienced a significant surge in demand during 2020. The company's share price rose by 360% between March and July, and gross sales increased by nearly 40% to reach AUD$768.9 million. This was largely due to the increased demand for online shopping during the pandemic, with consumers seeking technology, home entertainment, PPE, office supplies, and exercise equipment. While Kogan.com was able to keep up with the demand, other online retailers began to experience website crashes or slowdowns. Kogan.com's challenge was to manage this surge in demand while maintaining its strong infrastructure, stock reordering initiatives, and forecasting. The company also needed to manage the growth of its customer base, which was rapidly expanding.

The Access Group, a leading provider of business management software, faced significant challenges in managing its hybrid, multi-cloud environment. With over 60,000 customers and a diverse range of products across multiple sectors, the company was struggling with constant alert noise from different environments. Software engineers were inundated with alerts, making it difficult to distinguish critical alerts from noise. This resulted in engineers spending hours sifting through past tickets and searching code, which detracted from their primary tasks such as scaling and shipping features. The company's goal was to become 100% SaaS within five years and to gain an end-to-end view of its business transactions. However, the constant alert noise and the lack of a centralized view across systems were major obstacles to achieving this goal.

Benevity, one of the world's largest corporate purpose software providers, faced a significant challenge in maintaining platform reliability amidst rapid growth. The platform, which facilitates charitable donations, volunteer opportunities, and grants to nonprofits, processes tens of thousands of donation transactions daily. The challenge was not just about adding new customers but also accommodating sudden shifts in demand, especially during the holiday season, a period of dramatically increased giving. An outage of just 20 minutes on a high-demand day like Giving Tuesday could result in thousands of lost donations and up to hundreds of thousands in lost dollars. Surges in donations and volunteering could also come unexpectedly in response to natural disasters or other major social movements. To keep pace with these surges, Benevity needed to take a proactive approach to its monitoring, aiming to reduce its mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Bigbasket, India's largest online food and grocery store, faced a significant challenge in scaling its operations to meet the rapidly growing demand for online grocery shopping. The company, which offers over 18,000 products across 1,000 brands, was experiencing a 20% month-on-month growth and needed to ensure reliable performance and system resilience, especially during peak demand periods. The company's system was schedule-based, and orders took two to three hours to fulfill. To enable quicker delivery, Bigbasket needed to empower its team to identify any delays in the delivery process. Additionally, the company was looking to launch new products, such as quick commerce service bbnow and subscription-based bbdaily, in record time while delivering infrastructure cost savings.

CaratLane, India's largest online jeweller, faced a significant challenge in scaling its operations to meet the explosive growth in demand for its products. The COVID-19 pandemic had led to a surge in jewellery purchases, intensifying competition among online jewellery brands. CaratLane needed to maintain its competitive edge and build digital infrastructure to cope with the increased demand and scale for future capacity. The company had aggressive expansion plans for North America and the Asia Pacific region in 2022. The pandemic also changed the team's working dynamics, with most people working from home full time, altering how new features were rolled out into production. CaratLane's core backend services, which manage most of its APIs, were taking around 450 to 500 milliseconds, and the company could only scale horizontally when the load increased.

Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS), a company that grows nutritious food via automated growth towers, faced a significant challenge in maintaining the reliability of their system. The nature of their product demanded a high degree of reliability, as any outages could lead to the death of their crops. As a small organization, they needed insight into the system's reliability, especially as they scaled and handled larger volumes of data. Initially, they used Application Insights as a part of Microsoft Azure, but it wasn't well integrated with the amount of data they gathered due to their heavy use of Kubernetes. They considered open source solutions, but with only three people on the team, managing that would have turned into a full-time job. They needed a SaaS solution that adhered to open standards, allowed monitoring with logging and tracing, and was Kubernetes-native.

Accedo, a global video solutions provider, faced a significant challenge when it began hosting its clients' video applications. The company's newly formed DevOps team struggled with monitoring, managing, and scaling the cloud environment for these applications. The team needed to ensure availability, scalability, and reliability, while also being able to react quickly to customization and adaptation requirements. This required full-stack observability, a capability they initially lacked. The challenge was further compounded by the need to preempt potential bottlenecks and deliver the level of service that their clients expected for their hosted video services. Additionally, Accedo needed a way to gather and analyze customer sentiment data from social media platforms to identify potential issues and inform the development of new features.

HealthifyMe, a health and fitness app based in India, was facing a significant challenge in managing its growing user base, particularly during peak periods such as after Diwali, Christmas, and the New Year. The app, which has over 35 million downloads and 1500-plus nutrition, fitness, and yoga coaches, was experiencing a two to three times spike in traffic during these periods, causing a tremendous system load. Additionally, the company was also dealing with the challenge of streamlining COVID-19 vaccination bookings when the government rollout was launched for people in India under the age of 45. The booking slots were in short supply, and the team needed to build a feature that would allow people to find nearby vaccination slots with ease.

HT Digital Streams (HTDS), one of India’s fastest-growing digital media companies, serves around 250 million users every month across all its platforms. The company powers several of India’s leading news brands and is part of a rapidly evolving and highly competitive digital media and entertainment sector. The tech team at HTDS is tasked with delivering on wider business and core business metrics, monitoring performance, and addressing any technical issues. However, they faced significant challenges in measuring the impact of technology performance on business metrics such as revenue and profit, and correlating tech and strategic KPIs. The team also struggled with lost support tickets and issues falling through the cracks, which hindered their operational efficiency.