Casas Bahia is one of Brazil’s largest retail chains, specializing in furniture and home appliances. Today it operates over 1,000 physical stores across the country, alongside its robust e-commerce platform.
As Casas Bahia has grown, so has the complexity of its systems and data landscape. This complexity began to create major challenges and bottlenecks for the company’s digital teams.
Challenge: Rising costs, complex pipelines and operational bottlenecks
A web of data pipelines spanning multiple diverse systems made routine management and upkeep slow and difficult. Complicated systems and capabilities also became very hard to scale, limiting the company’s ability to keep up with rising demand and ensure consistent performance.
As its operations expanded, costs had also begun to rise sharply. Plus, low opportunity for automation made it hard to realize any potential efficiency-boosting or cost-saving opportunities.
Together, these challenges left Casas Bahia unable to respond effectively to changing business and customer needs. With Black Friday — the most demanding day in retail — rapidly approaching, the team decided it was time to move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and modernize its data infrastructure.
Solution: A seamless data lake migration to Google Cloud Platform
Casas Bahia’s primary objective was to seamlessly migrate its data lake and Databricks platform to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with a focus on modernizing its data pipelines and increasing operational efficiency. After the team spoke to Google, they selected Thoughtworks as the ideal partner to support that journey.
A wide range of pipelines, workflows, integrations and automated tasks all had to be seamlessly shifted between the two cloud platforms, without causing major disruption to the company’s operations or introducing new risk. So, we began by mapping out a clear migration roadmap.
The first step in our roadmap was to assess all of the company’s existing solutions in the legacy cloud platform and map out equivalent components in GCP. This helped us create a vision of Casas Bahia’s new GCP environment. Next, we built a robust migration strategy to get there.
The company’s data lake, Databricks platform and pipelines were all migrated to Google Cloud Composer and Airflow. Validated workflows were put in place to help meet high standards for performance, security and reliability. We even migrated a legacy SAS machine learning (ML) platform to Databricks to reduce costs, enhance scalability and leverage modern AI and ML capabilities.
Crucially, the migration also needed to be completed quickly. To ensure Casas Bahia was ready for Black Friday, we used automated tools to accelerate pipeline migration. Casa Bahia’s Road Runner accelerator, supported by Thoughtworks, played a vital role in this — not only increasing the efficiency of the migration process and helping us deliver a future-ready infrastructure against the clock, but also standardizing workflows to ensure long-term reliability and scalability.
Before the migration, our data lake created significant bottlenecks for the business and prevented us from consistently delivering the high standard of experience and service our customers expect. Now, with our new Google Cloud Platform foundation in place, we’ve been able to transform our workflows, streamline scalability and unlock new opportunities for cost reductions and business growth.
Outcome: Lower costs, greater scalability and a future-ready data foundation
Working closely with Google, Thoughtworks executed a seamless migration to GCP. Following the migration, Casas Bahia immediately saw costs fall by between 10 and 15%, with the potential to reach as high as 40% after further optimizations are made.
With the new foundation in place, Casas Bahia’s teams can now:
- Gain actionable insight into products and sales, enabling faster, smarter decision-making
- Scale seamlessly as the company’s data needs grow and ensure long-term reliability
- Achieve higher operational efficiency thanks to streamlined workflows and new automation opportunities
- Ensure system stability and deliver consistent performance and experiences during times of peak demand, such as Black Friday
- Grow with confidence with a more dynamic and resilient system behind them
- Avoid vendor lock-in and gain greater freedom to evolve and expand their data landscape however they wish
So far, Casas Bahia has achieved the following:
expected to reach values into the millions by the end of 2025
by adopting Databricks and migrating from SAS
to use the platform, making data more accessible across the organization
With the new foundation in place, Casas Bahia is now set to migrate additional workloads to GCP and continue optimizing its infrastructure to unlock even more cost-saving opportunities.
“This project really helped showcase the value of Thoughtworks’ migration accelerators,” says Leandro Montiel, Client Principal at Thoughworks. “Casas Bahia needed this migration to happen quickly and reliably, and proven capabilities like the Road Runner accelerator, a tool developed by them internally, helped make that happen. So, when Black Friday came, the company was completely ready to seize the opportunity.”
