CASE STUDY
Slice Intelligence → Rakuten
How Infrastructure Velocity Enabled a $30M Acquisition
E-commerce analytics platform transformed from 3-week deployment cycles to 2-hour deployments, enabling competitive feature velocity that contributed to successful acquisition.
Business Context
The Challenge
Slice Intelligence was a fast-growing e-commerce analytics platform analyzing millions of receipts to track consumer spending patterns.
They had product-market fit and growing revenue, but their infrastructure was becoming a competitive liability.
Deployment cycles taking 3 weeks meant they couldn't iterate fast enough against competitors, and regular downtimes were damaging customer trust during their most critical growth phase.
Technical Challenge
Distributed Monolith
- Running on EC2 instances
- Manual deployment process
- 3-week cycles
Operational Burden
- 80% ops time firefighting
- Regular downtimes
- No test environment
Business Impact
- Lost competitive deals
- Customer churn
- Engineering frustration
Strategic Approach
The Insight
This wasn't an infrastructure problem - it was a business velocity problem disguised as a technical issue.
Rather than optimize the existing monolith, we needed to architect for the business they wanted to become, not the system they currently had. The goal wasn't "better infrastructure" - it was "10x deployment velocity to enable acquisition."
Key Decisions:
- • Microservices architecture focused on team autonomy
- • EKS as foundation - managed control plane, focus on business logic
- • CI/CD pipeline as the product (not an afterthought)
Implementation
Phase 1: Foundation
- • Designed microservices
- • Built EKS cluster
- • Implemented ArgoCD
- • Created documentation
Phase 2: Migration
- • Decomposed to 40 microservices
- • Migrated incrementally
- • 100% uptime maintained
- • Trained dev team
Phase 3: Optimization
- • Automated testing
- • Built observability
- • Self-service platform
- • Documented runbooks
Business Impact
Immediate Results
- • 3 weeks → 2 hours
- • Zero planned downtime
Business Outcomes
- • 3 features in first quarter
- • 40% satisfaction improvement
The Acquisition
- • $30M acquisition
- • Infrastructure as asset