AEON Group uses a common API and Azure Database for MySQL infrastructure to transform developer experience

A large-scaled, common API/database infrastructure that supports the AEON Group’s DX initiatives was constructed with Azure

The AEON Group holds “Pursuing peace, respecting humanity, and contributing to local communities, always with the customer's point of view as its core” as its foundational ideals, and operates businesses including general merchandise stores, supermarkets, discount stores, health and wellness services, comprehensive financial services, and real estate development. Boasting over 300 group companies, consolidated sales exceeding 9 trillion yen, and more than 20,000 stores with 1.4 billion customer visits annually, the AEON Group has made the acceleration and advancement of digital transformation as one of their growth strategies in its 2021 to 2025 medium-term management plan, and has been implementing various DX initiatives.

Ken Yamazaki, CTO of AEON Co., Ltd. and Director and CTO of AEON Smart Technology Co., Ltd., shared information on the DX strategies and promotional framework of the AEON Group.

“ In the past three years, we have invested over 300 billion yen in digital initiatives. We have been developing a supermarket app that seamlessly integrates physical stores with digitalization, constructed a large-scaled infrastructure generated by 9 trillion yen of transactions, proceeded with an online market business using AI and robotics, and developed next-generation cash registers that transform shopping experiences for customers, just to name a few. AEON’s corporate culture has each group company independently operating their businesses while staying ‘loosely united’ with each other. AEON Smart Technology (AST) was established in 2020, and in 2024, it integrated some functions from AEON IBS Co., Ltd. (AIBS) , which used to be a subsidiary of AEON with IT functions. With this integration, AST is now responsible for everything from front-end to back-end IT systems, and is the driving force for company-wide DX.”

Establishing a common API/database infrastructure to be used across the entire company is one of the most important DX initiatives led by AST. This infrastructure is called ASP/B, and handles diverse business tasks across the group—everything from mobile app coupon issuing to POS payment processing.

Since being launched in 2021, ASP/B has gradually expanded its service coverage and is now positioned as the core platform necessary to drive the AEON Group’s DX initiatives. The managed container and database services of Microsoft Azure (Azure) have been incorporated for ASP/B.

The “loosely united” corporate culture of AEON had been causing the “reinvention of the wheel”

Yamazaki shares how ASP/B is currently being used within the organization.

“The ASP/B system extracts common business functions across AEON Group companies before consolidating them on one platform, making them all accessible through API. We could say that it is an enormous database and a cluster of APIs for delivery of data. For example, payment processing is a task that is common across all group companies. When payment tasks are conducted through various systems such as POS registers or smartphone apps, using ASP/B payment functions through APIs enable more efficient development. Furthermore, for situations in which we want to incorporate push notifications in a smartphone app, we can use the push notification features provided as common functions to swiftly improve app functions.”

In this way, a major benefit of ASP/B lies in how it can enhance the efficiency of service development and speedily improve apps to respond to customer needs. It is also said that the development of ASP/B was driven by a sense of concern regarding the loosely united corporate culture of the AEON Group, which made the progress of digital initiatives sluggish. Hikaru Saito, DevSecOps Division Director, one of the leaders of ASP/B development, gives us some insight into this situation.

“Our corporate culture was one that prioritizes initiatives at each group company, and up to this point, systems were developed at each company. For example, the coupon mechanism developed by AEON Retail did not exist in other group companies, so there was a need for each company to make their own system when it became necessary. We attempted to put a halt on ‘reinventing the wheel’ by incorporating ASP/B.”

In addition to this, they also intended to standardize their approach toward customers through digital technology, to pave the way for new retail initiatives.

“Interaction with customers and its know-how are all different across group companies. Due to this, the approach to digitalization also differed between group companies. Meanwhile, to drive new retail initiatives that utilize digital data, such as that seen in retail companies in the U.S. and China, there was a need to provide user experiences that were consistent across both physical stores and digital channels. This is why creating a common platform like ASP/B, which would be the foundation of group-wide businesses, was so important.”

The reliability of Microsoft services for enterprises is highly regarded

ASP/B development was conducted along with the development of iAEON, a smartphone app that integrates various AEON services. The iAEON app is a comprehensive application with functions such as AEON Pay smartphone payments, coupons, campaign information, AEON Lounge booking, and WAON POINT.

AEON membership services were also operated separately by each group company, just like the companies’ systems. In detail, there were services such as the AEON MALL membership, AEON Card membership, AEON Kyushu membership, WAON membership, AEON Wallet membership, AEON Bank membership, Ministop app membership, and Welcia Group membership. These separate systems were integrated under the “iAEON ID,” a common membership ID to use the iAEON app. Furthermore, APIs and databases used by iAEON ID were consolidated into ASP/B as a common platform, to establish shared membership ID and services.

“The iAEON app was launched in September 2021, and surpassed 10 million downloads by June 2024. We plan to integrate the data of more than 100 million users, including AEON Card and WAON members, with the iAEON ID, which should enable us to provide better digital services to customers,” says Yamazaki.

Azure was chosen to accelerate the integration of membership IDs, digital service expansion, and new retail initiatives. In detail, the iAEON database services incorporates Azure SQL Database, while ASP/B uses AKS, a managed container orchestration services, for its API infrastructure, and the Azure Database for MySQL, a managed MySQL database service, has been adopted for the database infrastructure. Yamazaki comments on the reasons why Azure was selected.

“Microsoft has a long history and culture of supporting enterprise customers, starting with Windows and Office. To promote DX in retail, we need more than cloud-native technology—we also need support towards enhancing our existing enterprise technology and skills into cloud-native technology and environments. Microsoft could make this happen, and selecting Azure as our infrastructure was the best solution for us.”

AST stands out in Japan’s retail sector, promoting DX with Azure

It is said that Azure’s managed services provide various benefits both in development and operations. Saito explains,

“Lowering operational costs, such as for patches and maintenance, is now possible because we do not need to manage SLAs. We can also enhance security along with authentication and authorization with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) and other various security services, and necessary monitoring and auditing services are in place for incidents. For example, regarding databases, tools and metrics to swiftly check slow queries are already available as standard functions, and these can be visualized for confirmation in dashboards. Establishing such an environment on-premises calls for significant effort. We are incredibly grateful for the Azure managed services.”

They say that their organizational structure changed into one that was more flexible to fully leverage Azure’s managed systems. Ever since its founding, AST has actively recruited engineers proficient in web, open-source software (OSS), and cloud-native technologies, and has incorporated methodologies such as Agile development and DevOps to promote in-house development. As the CTO, Yamazaki had this to say about the direction of technological strategies.

“Instead of building everything from scratch, we prioritize staying focused on our core goals by leveraging the best solutions available in the world as much as possible. Our focus should be on how to enhance our business and advance our DX. To achieve this, we make the most of open technology while migrating our infrastructure to cloud technologies. One of the best solutions available was Azure.”

Since being integrated with AIBS, AST now has approximately 300 engineers, ranging from those skilled in web applications and smartphone app development to veterans in the development and operation of core systems such as POS registers. By leveraging Azure, AST has become a company with presence among Japanese retail companies, as it drives DX focused on large-scaled, in-house development.

Leveraging unified support to achieve smooth operation of mission-critical systems

ASP/B is one of the core systems in the organization’s DX infrastructure, but it is also a mission-critical system. If it fails, all AEON Group services that access it through API will also come to a halt. Saito shares some of the challenges they faced with the system’s operation.

“MySQL used in ASP/B utilizes technologies such as sharding to enhance performance and distribute system load in order to maintain availability. There are approximately 60 MySQL instances that process over a hundred services operating on AKS on a daily basis. We make use of the Microsoft Unified Support for the stable operation of our services. We are able to receive diverse support from architecture design to operation, and as an engineer myself, I am grateful to be able to receive advice from expert engineers, and I feel as though I’m growing every day. Ever since the system’s launch, we have been able to maintain stable operation.”

Regarding the support they received up to this point, they received support for migration tasks for the switch from Azure Database for MySQL Single Server to Flexible Server. The transition was necessary due to the end of Single Server services, but with support from Microsoft, migration was completed without any issues.

Additionally, they say they have made most of the support regarding the upgrade from MySQL version 5 to 8, and are deepening their knowledge. As the organization cannot afford to have any system-wide outages, they had been on the lookout for an optimal switching method that considers the downtime of each instance, switchover points, and rollback functions. Saito’s evaluation of Microsoft support is as follows.

“One attractive aspect of Microsoft support is the outstanding engineers that are assigned to your case. They respond immediately via chat, and provide accurate advice not only for Microsoft products, but also for third-party tools such as OSS and commercial products. What personally surprised me was how Microsoft provides advice from the users’ perspective. They would advise us to do something, or not do something, even if that did not benefit their company. In this way, I have full trust in Microsoft.”

“We want to show how much an enterprise can change”

AST actively and openly shares its know-how and case examples regarding Azure in websites geared toward engineers such as “AEON TECH HUB” and “AEON TECH Blog”. Saito mainly contributes articles on technology that touch on the use of Azure services, and Yamazaki focuses on sharing his perspectives as a CTO. In Japan, it is rare for non-web companies to have technical blogs or technological information websites like this, and it seems as though they have garnered significant attention for it.

“When I participate in community activities or external events or seminars, more and more people are coming up to me and saying they have read my articles. I sense that engineers have started to gradually recognize that AEON has an interesting initiative going on. Furthermore, over the past three years in within our company, we have also seen a definite change in how people perceive IT, systems, and digital technology,” says Saito.

The internal and external efforts of Saito have been recognized, and he was awarded Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professionals) status in the Azure Kubernetes and Open Source category in March 2025. Building on this, Saito has this to say about future ASP/B initiatives.

“We will continue to move forward to refine our engineering organization. Our goal is to establish an architecture that is flexible and can withstand change, in order to prepare for business developments. Azure technology is essential for this to succeed.”

Additionally, Yamazaki notes that the support Microsoft offers to the various initiatives of user companies through Azure and open cloud technologies has founded a new culture across the entire AEON Group.

“Microsoft has stood with us and provided a wide range of support. They offer support that you wouldn’t receive from other cloud vendors. Out of curiosity, I once asked a representative of Microsoft, ‘Why do you provide such generous support?’ The answer was, ‘Because we want to create a positive culture with our clients.’ Instead of focusing on immediate profits or having Azure as the main character, their perspective puts weight on how to grow with their partner companies. I believe this is one strength of Microsoft.”

Furthermore, Yamazaki shares his outlook on the future.

“We want to be an example of how much a large-scaled enterprise can change. Naturally, we will continue to advance the DX of the AEON Group, but along with this, I hope to change how major Japanese corporations view DX. To make this happen, I hope Microsoft will stand by us more closely than before, and support our new initiatives.”

Microsoft will continue to support the AEON Group DX along with their future innovations.