Etnia Barcelona: CI/CD and Cloud Migration on Azure
Etnia Barcelona is an independent eyewear brand from Barcelona, known for its colorful designs made with natural acetate and mineral lenses. The brand reflects freedom, humanity, and respect for all ethnicities, with color and art at the core of its identity.
The company has more than 400 employees, 10,000 points of sale, and subsidiaries in Asia, Canada, and the United States. After investing €3M in its own production center in 2019, it strengthened design and prototyping processes between Spain and Hong Kong. Despite a -10% drop during COVID, forecasts for 2022 pointed to €80M in revenue, a 30% increase.
One of the main challenges was the scale of the project and the distribution of the IT department. Etnia’s 14 members were divided between Marketing and SAP/B2C/DBA/System Administration teams, which made it complex to fully understand their processes and workflows. This required adaptation and close alignment with the existing structure.
Another difficulty was the lack of testing. Projects from the Marketing Department had incomplete test suites, leaving critical workflows only partially covered. This situation forced the team to rely on manual checks and tasks during the deployment process.
Finally, the use of opaque infrastructure limited visibility. The Marketing Department had no access to relevant metrics, dashboards, or monitoring tools to evaluate the impact of new features or detect potential bottlenecks in their systems.
Etnia’s modernization process
The project started with the introduction of CI/CD pipelines to automate deployments and reduce manual tasks, ensuring faster iterations and minimizing errors. In parallel, a Kubernetes environment was created in Azure to stress test applications, detect performance issues, and provide greater reliability during releases.
The team also assisted the development department in its transition to cloud computing. By adapting existing workflows and aligning them with new practices, Etnia gained better visibility, monitoring, and control of its infrastructure.
Technology
Backend development: Bash, Make, Docker, Nginx, PHP-FPM, PHP-FPM Exporter, MySQL, JMeter
Kubernetes development: Azure, Kind/Kubernetes, K9s, Helm, Prometheus Operator Stac
Results
- Modernized B2B platform by migrating infrastructure to Azure Kubernetes
- Streamlined deployments with CI/CD pipelines
- Increased security by storing credentials in Azure Vaults
- Improved monitoring and visibility across systems
- Enhanced control and scalability of the platform
- Project completed in 2 months
We are ready for new challenges
