Swiss Automotive Group (SAG) · Auto parts distribution · E-commerce
From crisis to resilience: stabilizing a 6M-transaction-a-day platform
A payments-grade platform in active collapse. Stabilized in days, zero downtime since.
The situation
Swiss Automotive Group is Europe's largest independent auto-parts distributor: 1.8 million SKUs, market leader across 12 EU markets, and over 95% of transactions now running through its e-commerce platform. As volume scaled past 6 million transactions a day, the legacy middleware supporting SAG Cloud collapsed mid-trading. The Kubernetes layer was in place, but everything around it had drifted far from modern standards. A single-point-of-failure stack that had become a security and availability liability.
What we did
- Stabilized production under active failure conditions. Restored trading in days, not weeks.
- Built a brand-new cloud-native infrastructure in parallel, following Azure Cloud Adoption, Well-Architected, and Zero Trust frameworks.
- Introduced fully auditable GitOps release cycles, autoscaling, and Infrastructure-as-Code via Terraform.
- Swapped ad-hoc auth and secrets for OIDC passwordless service-to-service, Bitwarden for clients, Azure Key Vault for apps, and an XDR solution for detection.
- Migrated off the legacy environment in weeks with no customer-visible disruption.
- Drove a FinOps practice with the internal team: reserved instances, dev/test pricing, log-volume optimization.
The outcome
- Zero hours of downtime across three-plus years since cutover.
- Platform capacity expanded 50–60% with headroom for peak-traffic and disaster recovery.
- Infrastructure cost down ~60% through autoscaling, reserved capacity, and FinOps discipline.
- Log volume cut 60%; log storage cost cut 40%.
- Fully automated SSL lifecycle via Let's Encrypt. Certificates stop being a source of incidents.
- Security posture aligned with Azure governance policies and enterprise-grade frameworks.
Stack
We took ownership at the infrastructure layer while the system was still unstable and rebuilt the platform alongside live trading. SAG’s team now operates a system that doesn’t require heroics. It hasn’t dropped a minute of uptime since.