LiquidBarcodes achieved a 45% cost reduction with drastically improved platform stability. They also enabled full developer self-service by modernising their platform delivery, DevOps practices and data infrastructure in partnership with GOStack.
OVERVIEW
Information
- Client: LiquidBarcodes
- Industry: RetailTech / Loyalty & Subscription Platform
- Project Type: GitOps-Driven Platform Modernisation, DevOps Transformation & Data Platform Overhaul
- Services: Amazon EKS, Aurora MySQL, Amazon ElastiCache, DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Glue, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon S3, MongoDB, AWS DocumentDB, Tableau, GitHub Actions, GitOps with ArgoCD, Infrastructure as Code
Intro
LiquidBarcodes is the leading loyalty and subscription platform for convenience retail. It is trusted by some of the world’s most recognised fuel and convenience brands including 7-Eleven, Circle K, Mapco and Maxol. Founded in Norway in 2015, the company now operates globally with offices in Spain and the United States. It powers over 4 million loyalty transactions per month, serves 15 million loyalty members worldwide and processes more than 1.2 million payment transactions annually. Their platform brings together gamification, automation, advanced segmentation and mobile-first experiences. These features help retailers drive visit frequency, increase basket size and build long-term customer loyalty.
As LiquidBarcodes scaled rapidly across new markets and retail partners, the demands on their platform grew significantly. They needed an infrastructure partner who could modernise their engineering practices, stabilise their platform and build a data architecture capable of supporting the analytical demands of a global, high-transaction loyalty business. They chose GOStack.
The Challenge
Rapid global expansion and growing customer expectations exposed deep-rooted challenges in LiquidBarcodes’ existing infrastructure and engineering practices.
- Legacy CI/CD Pipeline: The team relied on Jenkins for continuous integration and deployment. This setup had become difficult to maintain, slow to run and a source of frequent deployment failures. There was no clear separation between CI and CD concerns, making the delivery pipeline brittle and hard to reason about.
- No GitOps Discipline: Deployments were largely manual and inconsistent across environments. Without a single source of truth for the desired state of the system, configuration drift was common, environment discrepancies were routine and releases were unpredictable.
- Lack of Developer Autonomy: The development team lacked the autonomy to provision and manage resources independently, creating dependencies on operations staff and hindering their ability to experiment, innovate and take ownership of their services.
- Platform Instability: The existing infrastructure lacked the resilience and observability needed to support a platform processing millions of transactions per month. Incidents were difficult to diagnose, recovery was slow and the team had limited visibility into what was happening in production.
- Fragmented Data: Loyalty and transactional data was spread across multiple systems with no unified platform. This made it difficult to deliver the deep analytics and reporting that retail partners expected. It also limited LiquidBarcodes’ ability to make data-driven product decisions internally.
- Security and Compliance Gaps: As the platform expanded into regulated markets and handled increasing volumes of payment and personal data, the need for a more structured approach to security, access control and compliance became critical.
- Rising Infrastructure Costs: Without proper cloud financial management, infrastructure spend was growing faster than the business. There was limited visibility into what was driving costs or where savings could be found.
Our Solution
GOStack designed and delivered a comprehensive modernisation programme across both the application platform and the data infrastructure.
CI/CD Transformation: The first and most impactful change was replacing the legacy Jenkins pipeline with a modern, decoupled CI/CD architecture. GitHub Actions now handles all continuous integration, building, testing and validating code changes in a fast, cloud-native environment directly integrated with the team’s Git workflow. For continuous delivery, we introduced ArgoCD, a declarative GitOps tool that manages all deployments to the Kubernetes cluster. Every deployment is now driven by a Git commit, giving the team a full audit trail, instant rollback capability and a clean separation between what is built and what is deployed.
GitOps-Driven Infrastructure: We established a GitOps operating model across the entire platform. All Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts and environment configurations are stored in Git and reconciled continuously by ArgoCD. This eliminated configuration drift, made environment promotion predictable and repeatable. It also gave every team member clear visibility into the current and desired state of every service. Infrastructure changes go through the same pull request and review process as application code, raising the quality bar across the board.
Infrastructure as Code: We implemented a strict Infrastructure as Code approach for every layer of the stack. No resource is provisioned manually. All AWS infrastructure is defined, versioned and deployed through code. This includes Amazon EKS clusters, Aurora MySQL databases, Amazon ElastiCache for caching, DynamoDB tables, AWS Lambda functions and Amazon API Gateway configurations. This ensures consistency across environments, enables rapid disaster recovery and makes the full infrastructure auditable and reproducible.
Self-Service Development Platform: The modernised platform empowers LiquidBarcodes’ engineering teams with genuine self-service capabilities. Developers can provision environments, deploy services, access logs and metrics. They can also manage their own infrastructure without depending on a central operations team. This autonomy has significantly reduced bottlenecks and allowed product teams to move at their own pace.
Data Platform Modernisation: We built a modern, unified data platform to replace the fragmented data landscape. AWS Glue handles ETL pipelines, ingesting and transforming loyalty, transactional and behavioural data from multiple sources. Processed data lands in Amazon Redshift for high-performance analytical querying. Amazon Athena enables ad-hoc SQL analysis directly against raw data in Amazon S3. Document-oriented workloads are handled by AWS DocumentDB, providing a managed, scalable alternative to self-hosted MongoDB. Tableau sits on top of this stack, giving business and retail partner teams rich, interactive dashboards and reporting capabilities.
Enhanced Security and Compliance: We implemented a layered security model across the platform. This included fine-grained IAM policies, network segmentation, secrets management and automated compliance checks baked into the CI/CD pipeline. Security is enforced at every stage of the delivery process, not treated as an afterthought.
FinOps and Cost Governance: We introduced cloud financial management practices from the ground up. This included resource tagging, cost allocation, rightsizing and automated scaling policies. The team now has full visibility into spending by service, environment and team, enabling informed decisions and continuous cost optimisation.
Results and Benefits
- Cost Reduction: 45% reduction in infrastructure costs through FinOps practices, rightsizing and architectural optimisation
- Platform Stability: Drastically improved platform stability with automated self-healing, proactive monitoring and faster incident response
- Self-Service Platform: Engineering teams are fully empowered to deploy, manage and operate their services independently
- Modern CI/CD: Jenkins replaced by GitHub Actions for CI and ArgoCD for CD, delivering faster, more reliable and fully auditable deployments
- GitOps Discipline: Every deployment is Git-driven, with full audit trails, instant rollback and zero configuration drift
- Infrastructure as Code: 100% of infrastructure defined and managed as code, with no manual provisioning or undocumented changes
- Unified Data Platform: Fragmented data silos replaced by a cohesive analytics stack, enabling deeper insights for internal teams and retail partners
- Enhanced Security: Comprehensive security controls and compliance automation embedded across the entire platform
- Scalability: The platform scales seamlessly to support millions of loyalty transactions per month across global retail partners
Transformation Impact
The modernisation programme has fundamentally changed how LiquidBarcodes builds, operates and scales their platform.
With GitHub Actions and ArgoCD in place, the engineering team ships faster and with greater confidence. They spend less time managing infrastructure and more time building product. The platform now handles the demands of a global, high-transaction loyalty business with the reliability that enterprise retail partners expect.
The unified data platform enables LiquidBarcodes to deliver richer analytics to retail partners and make smarter product decisions internally, strengthening their market position. The modernised architecture is built to grow. This means onboarding new retail partners, entering new markets or launching new product capabilities.
About GOStack
GOStack is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner specialising in platform modernisation, DevOps, GitOps and data analytics on AWS. We help technology companies replace legacy infrastructure with modern, scalable and cost-efficient cloud platforms. We also embed the engineering practices that make those platforms sustainable long-term.
Why Partner with Us for Platform Modernisation?
Legacy CI/CD pipelines, fragmented data and manual infrastructure management are problems we have solved many times over. We bring a proven approach to modernisation that delivers results quickly without disrupting ongoing product development. If your platform is holding back your engineering team, let’s talk. Contact us to start your cloud journey.
