Key Facts
V2 AI partnered with AWS and OTR to design and deliver a modern cloud platform. OTR is one of Australia’s fastest-growing convenience retail networks, following its merger with Viva Energy Group.
The modernised platform enables the OTR App to support up to three times the growth in demand without compromising performance or customer experience during peak trading periods.
Cost-efficient scalability ensures infrastructure spend grows predictably as demand increases, lowering the cost to serve each additional customer.
Standardised cloud foundations significantly accelerate speed to market, allowing OTR to launch new capabilities with confidence.
A strengthened security posture protects revenue, brand trust, and customer loyalty across a 24/7 national operation.
Engineering capability uplift empowers OTR teams to operate and innovate on the platform independently, ensuring technology continues to enable growth.
The Client: Rapidly Growing Convenience Retail Chain
OTR is an Australian convenience retail company, offering 24/7 food, fuel, and groceries, including quick service dining for 90+ top brands like Hungry Jacks, Subway, and Oporto, alongside its own iconic brands. The recent merger with ASX-listed Viva Energy Group has enabled OTR to expand its footprint to more than 1,000 locations nationwide and move closer to its goal of becoming Australia’s largest convenience retailer.
The Challenge: Modernising a Legacy Platform Under Live Demand
The OTR App is a critical digital engagement channel for the business, enabling customers to pre-order food and access loyalty rewards and fuel discounts, influencing customer behaviour through time-sensitive promotions and targeted offers.
However, following the acquisition by Viva Energy Group, the app’s user base increased threefold with the integration of hundreds of new locations across Australia. Any outage at peak trading moments risked lost revenue and negative customer experiences.
To prevent performance and reliability from becoming a scalability ceiling, the App needed an infrastructure and platform upgrade. However, the platform required modernisation across databases, services, and operating practices to support the next phase of growth. Although built on AWS infrastructure, elements of the architecture reflected earlier cloud design patterns that no longer aligned with modern standards.
The challenge was therefore twofold:
Build a modern, scalable, reliable, and secure cloud platform aligned to AWS Well-Architected Framework principles and enterprise best practices.
Migrate and selectively modernise the existing OTR application onto this new platform, while ensuring stability for a high-volume, 24/7 customer channel.
The Solution: A Cloud Platform Designed to Evolve
OTR required more than a like-for-like infrastructure upgrade. They needed a partner that could execute a greenfield AWS landing zone for both - scaling the current application and supporting future AI readiness and innovation.
V2 AI, in partnership with AWS, designed and delivered a modern cloud platform on AWS, leveraging the AWS Well-Architected Framework and enterprise best practices. We successfully migrated the OTR app to the new platform. Design considerations included:
Scaling with minimal operational overhead due to application containerisation of the existing application from AWS Elastic Beanstalk to AWS Fargate for Amazon ECS.
Optimal price-performance by utilising AWS Graviton processors
Reducing operational risk by moving from a single to a multi-account structure built using AWS Control Tower with AWS Account Factory for Terraform.
By selectively modernising components, we progressively reduced technical debt without introducing risk to live operations. The solution was intentionally architected to be extensible. New workloads, whether additional business applications, data platforms, or AI solutions, can now be onboarded without returning to first principles.
This future-proofing gives OTR a durable platform for innovation, allowing technology to enable growth rather than constrain it.
Value Delivered: A Future-Proofed Foundation for Reduced Risk and Confident Growth
As OTR continues to expand following the Viva Energy merger, the modernised cloud platform provides the confidence to scale securely, reliably, and at speed. Rather than solving for a single application, it establishes a durable foundation for future growth and AI initiatives.
Cost-Efficient Scalability
The new platform is designed to support up to 3x growth in demand without degrading performance or reliability. Containerisation and modern compute choices ensure infrastructure costs increase predictably rather than disproportionately. For example, AWS Graviton delivers up to 40% price-performance gains in compute costs. OTR can support significantly higher demand while reducing the cost to serve each additional user.
Faster Speed to Market
Their new intelligent platform provides consistency across identity, networking, and security controls. New workloads can now be provisioned without returning to first principles each time the business wants to try something new. OTR can move faster when new opportunities emerge, whether launching new digital products, integrating additional applications, or exploring AI-driven use cases.
Enhanced Security
Security is now consistently enforced by default. Isolating application workloads from shared services and network layers has minimised the blast radius for any unforeseen incidents. Security and compliance can scale with the business rather than becoming an afterthought.
Team Uplift
We worked closely with OTR’s engineers to introduce modern cloud engineering practices, patterns, and ways of working. Aligning delivery practices to enterprise-grade standards has allowed the OTR team to extend and operate the environment independently. Capability uplift ensures the platform can evolve alongside OTR’s future business and AI ambitions.
A Greenfield AWS Platform Built for Scale, Security, and Agility
V2 AI delivered a greenfield AWS platform with production-grade application migration, while maintaining uninterrupted service for a high-volume, always-on customer channel. The platform reduces operational risk, accelerates decision-making and innovation, and gives OTR the confidence to grow without technology becoming a constraint.
Expert Guidance for Business-Critical Database Migration
Beyond the core platform build, V2 AI provided critical support for a business-critical database migration. Databases are often among the highest-risk components of any migration, owing to outages, data corruption risks, and impact on customers and their orders.
Recognising the sensitivity of this component to OTR’s 24/7 operations, we developed a comprehensive migration runbook process, encompassing rigorous testing protocols and on-the-day support documentation.
This ensured the OTR team was empowered to execute the final migration step with maximum confidence, successfully transitioning the core data engine with minimal disruption to customer-facing services. This playbook has also given them the in-house capability to perform further upgrades in the future.
