Headquartered in Westborough, Massachusetts, BJ's is the leading operator of
membership warehouse clubs in the Eastern United States. The company currently
operates 217 clubs and 138 BJ's Gas® locations in 16 states.
BJ’s Wholesale Club is known for delivering value to its members on thousands of prod-
ucts. The chain offers everything families need, from fresh food and diapers to apparel,
TVs and gas.
BJ’s is continually finding ways to further improve the member experience and provide
convenient shopping options. As part of this effort, the company has been undergoing
a cloud transformation that is improving the functionality of both its brick and mortar
and online operations, providing a more personalized shopping experience for
members.
BJ’s started its public cloud journey in 2017. In the beginning, the company’s goal was
similar to other organizations’: to migrate applications and systems to the cloud to
reduce its data center footprint.
But over time, several other goals emerged. These included: improving agility, to help
IT respond to infrastructure requests faster; replacing heavyweight back-end applica-
tions with nimbler ones in the cloud; and being able to innovate faster by leveraging
cloud-based solutions. The warehouse club also wanted to change its IT culture – to
drive more automation, to infuse DevSecOps into its processes and to create excitement
around rewarding its people for building deep skills in cloud technologies.
The objectives were to be cloud-first, cloud-agnostic and to assemble a world-class
organization of technologists.
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