Kroger: Meeting growing data needs in the cloud

Kroger is the second-largest general retailer in the United States, serving nearly nine million customers daily in 2,800 retail food stores under a variety of local banner names in 35 states. 

Kroger historically relied on an on-premises big data platform. It wanted to migrate to a scalable data lake in the cloud that decoupled storage and processing to meet the evolving needs of the business and keep pace with rapidly expanding data volumes and processing requirements.

It needed a data lake solution that allowed internal business users, data analysts, and data scientists to easily analyze data and extract insights. This platform needed to handle large quantities of data with enterprise class features, including security and performance. 

Kroger turned to Egen to help migrate its current data lake and re-architect it for deployment in Google Cloud Platform. In addition to migrating Kroger’s on-premises data lake and data marts to BigQuery, Egen established architectural guidelines, best practices implementation recommendations, and coding patterns to create a playbook for Kroger data scientists and engineers adopting BigQuery. We also established best practices for data ingestion and data modeling, providing a blueprint for setting up complex data lakes in the cloud.

With its move from on-premises to the cloud, Kroger now has more scalability, reliability, and repeatability.