Enkel | Case - Camil Kubernetes

Modernizing Camil's Ecosystem with Kubernetes

Camil is one of the largest food companies in Brazil and Latin America, boasting a diverse portfolio of brands in the grains, sugar, and seafood segments, with leading positions in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Peru. Founded in 1963 in Itaqui, Rio Grande do Sul, as Cooperativa Agrícola Mista Itaquiense LTDA. (CAMIL), the group also owns brands such as Açúcar União and Coqueiro, holding a 40% share of the Brazilian seafood market. In 2020, Camil entered the animal feed industry in Chile.

The group has plants in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, and recently in Ecuador. It employs over 4,415 people, with brands exported to more than 50 countries.

In 2021, the group acquired the food company Santa Amália from the Peruvian Alicorp group for 410 million reais, entering the pasta, mixes, and chocolate segment. In the same year, Seleto became Camil's new acquisition in the coffee sector. Keeping up with acquisitions, Camil entered the coffee segment.

Challenge

The project's inception was driven by the client's need to modernize and streamline partner and customer integrations, as well as the company's acquisition processes.

The main objective was to create a dynamic infrastructure to accommodate microservices responsible for various integration processes – both external processes via API and their execution in on-premises legacy systems. This aimed at improving visibility within the environment, enabling detailed tracking of application calls through traces, and ensuring greater reliability in the elastic growth of the environment during consumption peaks.

Solution Architecture

The proposed solution is based on the use of a Kubernetes cluster using the managed service on AWS, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), in conjunction with other services such as Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon Cognito, Amazon Simple Queue Service, Amazon Simple Email Service, and Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

The entire creation and management of the environment were done with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, through a CI/CD flow for promoting changes between environments.

Results

With the implementation of this microservices architecture for orchestrating system integration processes, Camil quickly achieved scalability gains by migrating monolithic processes to this new platform and rapidly deploying new integration and automation projects hosted on Kubernetes. A new project or integration can be available in days, not months.

In addition to the agility for the go-to-market strategy, with an elastic environment, it is possible to scale up and down during seasonal periods, always meeting business demands.