Platform stabilization, infrastructure migration, and managed services for a major Canadian non-profit's donation platform and online store

The Challenge

A major Canadian non-profit's donation platform and online store — one of the organisation's primary revenue channels — was inherited from a previous implementation vendor in a working but unstable state. It ran Sitecore CMS in a Kubernetes cluster in a local data centre, a combination producing persistent instability and frequent outages, with significant technical debt at both the application and infrastructure levels.

The stakes were high: a live platform managing recurring donor subscriptions and payment methods, where any extended outage carried direct revenue impact and threatened the donor trust the organisation's mission depends on.

The Approach

The platform was taken over under a managed-services and support contract, working alongside the organisation's internal development, BA, PM, and IT-management teams. Scope spanned Severity 1 incident response, feature development, architecture reviews, and two major infrastructure transformations.

The first migration moved the platform from Kubernetes (Rancher) to hosted VMs, eliminating the instability of running Sitecore in a containerized local data centre; stability improved immediately and measurably. A subsequent full Azure cloud migration — fronted by Azure Application Gateway with Azure B2C identity — moved the platform to cloud-native hosting. Product work included a redesigned child-sponsorship donation experience (replacing a product-catalogue model with a more humane, decolonized donor experience), self-service payment-method management for recurring donors, and checkout optimisation through asynchronous transaction processing.

The Outcome

Outages dropped to near zero after the Kubernetes-to-VM migration, and the Azure migration positioned the platform for long-term operational resilience. The child-sponsorship redesign strengthened donor language and experience — with both revenue and mission impact — and the payment self-service feature measurably reduced load on the donor-care team.

Technologies Used

Sitecore 10, CommerceTools, .NET MVC, Docker, Kubernetes, Rancher, Azure Application Gateway, Azure B2C, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, iATS Payments, Azure.

Anonymized professional experience from a senior engineering and architecture role at a leading North American technology firm. Presented to illustrate scale, technology, and solution — not an Azzal Solutions client engagement.