Safeway Albertsons Customer Loyalty DataStax Enterprise Architecture Review

Safeway is an American supermarket chain providing grocery items, food and general merchandise, with a variety of specialty departments — bakery, delicatessen, floral and pharmacy — alongside Starbucks coffee shops and fuel centers. It operates as a subsidiary within the wider Albertsons group.

Safeway relies on DataStax Enterprise deployed on Azure for its online customer web and mobile experience, known as LOYALTY. The platform services over 6 Million users and 1 Billion coupon clips per year across 904 locations in 17 states — a workload where a slow coupon clip is a lost basket.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into Safeway to review the DataStax Enterprise Cassandra and Solr Search clusters running on Azure, confirming best practices were being followed and that performance was optimized.

RhinoSource reviewed Safeway's DataStax cluster architecture and configurations along with its data models and Solr indexes, then made architectural and configuration recommendations to improve cluster performance and reliability.

RhinoSource also helped plan major DataStax software upgrades, worked through the multi-region bidirectional advanced replication scenarios the platform depended on, and recommended improvements to cluster monitoring and alerting so the ops team could see problems developing rather than discover them at checkout.