For over 30 years, the client’s production logistics platform had quietly powered one of the world’s most respected brands. Anchored in earlier, tightly coupled on-premises systems, it had served reliably—but the next chapter demanded more flexibility.

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The rise of electric vehicles, fluctuating global demand, and increasingly volatile supply chain environments meant that the system’s architecture—while stable—was fundamentally unfit for what came next. Scaling was difficult, releasing updates took hours, and even minor errors could affect production continuity across continents.

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Hardwired on-premises infrastructure created a bottleneck. The system’s structure, while modular in parts, had limited scalability and lacked support for modern DevOps practices. What it needed was not just a technical upgrade, but a strategic bridge to the cloud-native world.

The selection process was competitive, rigorous, and global. Over the previous five years, Gloster demonstrated not only technical credibility but a unique delivery profile that set it apart from larger market players. Ultimately, the client selected Gloster to continue to operate and implement the DevOps integration layer for the modernisation initiative.

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What made Gloster stand out?

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• Proven nearshore delivery model, with flexible, multilingual teams able to collaborate across German, Hungarian, and Portuguese offices.
• Deep DevOps maturity, including CI/CD automation, blue/green deployment strategy, and platform reliability engineering.
• End-to-end accountability, offering not just code, but operational oversight, change management, and stakeholder communication.

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In essence, Gloster didn’t position itself as a supplier—it acted as a partner. This distinction shaped the success of the project.

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Gloster was appointed as the central DevOps Provider within the client’s multinational matrix. Our role was to integrate the outputs of several independent Scrum teams, align platform delivery across technology and operations, and ensure that deployment, monitoring, and feedback loops remained consistent at enterprise scale.

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We didn’t just build pipelines—we designed them for resilience, auditability, and velocity. We didn’t just containerise services—we engineered deployment patterns for scalability, secure configuration, and fail-safe rollback.

The transformation strategy was phased and risk-aware, designed from the outset to protect the integrity of live production systems.

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Key Technical Elements:

• Microservices-first architecture: The new system was designed around more than 60 modular, independently deployable services. Each component could be developed, tested, and deployed without interfering with the rest of the system.
• Azure cloud migration: Rather than lift-and-shift, the client moved to a replatformed architecture, using infrastructure-as-code and managed services to accelerate provisioning, increase resilience, and reduce operational overhead.
• CI/CD and blue/green deployments: Fully automated pipelines enabled teams to deploy to production within minutes. Blue/green infrastructure ensured rollback was instantaneous in the event of deployment errors, without impacting factory operations.
• Data handling at scale: Over 500 GB of structured data was processed nightly and indexed into Apache Solr to support BOM (Bill of Materials) delivery to 40+ factories. Real-time reads ensured that manufacturing lines had the data they needed, when they needed it.
• Platform observability: Gloster implemented robust monitoring and alerting frameworks using Prometheus and Grafana. This provided stakeholders with a real-time view of system health and performance.

By moving to cloud-native infrastructure, teams gained direct control over scaling, automated rollback, and global load balancing — ensuring resilience, responsiveness, and cost efficiency across all production sites.

Gloster didn’t just deliver tooling—we embedded a DevOps operating model inside the client’s delivery structure. This model became the backbone of the transformation.

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• Integration Hub: We sat at the intersection of product, platform, and release teams—ensuring continuity and cross-functional alignment.
• Standardised workflows: Every new feature followed the same rigor—unit tests, integration tests, environment promotion, and deployment.
• Release acceleration: The team moved from quarterly production releases to a biweekly cadence, with zero unplanned downtime.
• Knowledge transfer and onboarding: We provided documentation, training, and enablement to client-side teams, ensuring continuity beyond the engagement.

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This model wasn’t theoretical—it was battle-tested in one of the most operationally demanding IT environments in the world.

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Beyond the technology, the transformation succeeded because of people. Distributed teams in Hungary, Germany, and Portugal worked in full transparency, building an ownership mindset and shared trust that turned a complex delivery environment into a high-performing partnership.

The technical success of the transformation is only part of the story. The strategic impact was equally significant:

• Zero downtime: All systems were validated in parallel via a shadow architecture before cutover, ensuring operational continuity.
• Global scale: Every BMW production line globally now relies on this system to receive and process daily logistics data.

Rapid iteration: With automated test coverage and CI/CD pipelines, new features could be pushed to production in hours, not weeks.

The client has since extended Gloster’s contract, reaffirming trust in our technical leadership and delivery model. The platform is now entering its next evolution:

• Increased automation: Through serverless compute and event-driven design patterns
• Wider system integration: With corporate ERP, supplier portals, and edge IoT systems

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As long as cars roll off the line, this system—and our support—remains mission-critical.

Modernisation isn’t just a technical challenge—it’s an operational, human, and cultural one. At Gloster, we work shoulder-to-shoulder with clients, co-owning outcomes, absorbing complexity, and reducing risk.

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Whether you’re operating complex on-premises systems or designing cloud-native platforms from the ground up, we can help you evolve—without disruption.

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Let’s talk about your production IT roadmap.