Pizza Nova goes cloud native and changes the way its business can grow
By upgrading its legacy infrastructure and moving to the cloud, Pizza Nova streamlined its operations, minimized disruptions and unlocked new opportunities for growth.
Industry
Food and Beverage
Challenge
To remain competitive and expand, Pizza Nova needed to modernize its IT infrastructure. Its existing technologies limited its operational efficiency and hindered its ability to evolve its customers’ experience.
Outcome Through a phased migration strategy, Pizza Nova successfully modernized its IT foundation, ensuring business continuity while preparing for expansion across Canada. Solutions Cloud Adoption & Migration, Optimizer+ Platforms Amazon Web Services (AWS)Professional & Managed Services
Rackspace Modern Operations, Professional Services, Managed ServicesCustomer
Since 1963, Pizza Nova has been serving authentic Italian cuisine with the same care it brings to its own family’s table. The first restaurant opened in Scarborough, Ontario, and today, the family-owned business has grown to over 150 locations across Canada. Known for its premium ingredients and traditional recipes, Pizza Nova serves more than five million pizzas annually, along with a diverse menu that includes panzerottis, Italian sandwiches, lasagna, salads and chicken wings.
President Domenic Primucci carries forward the legacy that his father and uncles started when they opened the original Pizza Nova. Under the Primucci family's leadership, the company has helped hundreds of franchise owners build their own Pizza Nova locations — all united by a simple commitment: delivering high-quality Italian food made with the freshest ingredients.
“We needed more advanced technologies, and we knew we couldn’t do it alone. We needed support from the right partners; partners who have the people and a culture that matches our family-run business.”
Situation
Pizza Nova faced three critical technology challenges that were limiting its ability to scale and innovate, according to David Lameiras, Director of Technology at Pizza Nova. The company wanted to expand but needed a modernized IT infrastructure to support its plans.
The first challenge was its legacy MySQL database infrastructure, which was running on an older version that lacked compatibility with modern AWS services, as a result, a direct migration was not feasible. It required a phased database upgrade and re-platforming strategy before cloud adoption could proceed.
The second challenge was ensuring uninterrupted connectivity between its 150 stores and the corporate database once the migration was completed. Maintaining seamless connectivity required rearchitecting Pizza Nova’s software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) to accommodate its evolving technology stack.
“Our database is our single source of truth,” said Lameiras. “It contains everything from our recipes to inventory to customer records. At hundreds of gigabytes, it’s huge — and it’s essential to everything we do. Without continuous access, our stores would not be able to operate efficiently.”
The third challenge was minimizing downtime during migration. Unlike a traditional nine-to-five business, Pizza Nova’s restaurants operate throughout the day, evenings and weekends. Any disruption to operations could result in a significant revenue loss. This meant that a precise scheduling and execution plan for the migration activities was essential.
“Our business must be agile and able to adapt quickly. That requires the right infrastructure. AWS provides the foundation, and Rackspace brings the expertise. Together, they position us to lead in our industry.”
Solution
Pizza Nova needed a cloud partner that could support both its migration and ongoing operations. With a lean IT team, it sought a provider that could deliver the technical expertise, managed services and operational support required to modernize its infrastructure without disrupting business operations.
Given its existing relationship with Rackspace Technology®, the company recognized that Rackspace could provide the depth of experience and hands-on support necessary for a successful transition.
“We wanted a technology partner who we felt would not only manage our cloud migration effectively but also provide long-term operational support,” said Lameiras. “Rackspace was the ideal choice.”
After selecting Rackspace, Pizza Nova evaluated its cloud platform options and ultimately chose AWS. “Moving to the cloud was an obvious decision,” Lameiras explained. “It gave us more technology options, better scalability and greater integration with other systems.”
AWS also provided financial support through its Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), which helped streamline the transition. “At the end of the day, AWS had the best offering for what we needed,” noted Lameiras. “The MAP funding was a significant advantage for us.”
With the strategy in place, Rackspace began addressing Pizza Nova’s key technology challenges, including:
- Database modernization: The company’s legacy MySQL database needed to be upgraded before migrating. Rackspace designed and executed a phased upgrade, ensuring compatibility with AWS-native services and modern cloud architectures.
- Network architecture: To maintain seamless connectivity across its 150 stores, headquarters and fulfillment centers, Rackspace redesigned Pizza Nova’s SD-WAN architecture. This delivered uninterrupted communication between the customer-facing frontend, backend systems and corporate resources.
- Minimized downtime: Given Pizza Nova’s extended business hours, the migration was carefully orchestrated within several four- to six-hour maintenance windows. Rackspace developed a highly precise migration schedule, timing every step down to the minute. This included replicating the database, reconfiguring DNS on both the frontend and backend, and executing cutovers with minimal disruption.
- Risk mitigation and testing: To enhance reliability, Rackspace employed a parallelized database migration approach using a specialized tool rather than standard AWS-native methods. Before the final migration, the team conducted a full-scale mock migration to validate the process and minimize risk.
Outcome
By combining hands-on expertise with proactive project management, Rackspace helped Pizza Nova transition to a more scalable, secure and cost-effective cloud environment on AWS.
To provide the ongoing system management Pizza Nova needed, Rackspace recommended a suite of services designed to support both modernization and long-term operational stability, including:
- Rackspace Professional Services: Designed and executed a phased database upgrade and migration strategy, allowing for a smooth transition to a modernized infrastructure on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).
- Optimizer+ with Platform Support: Delivers cost optimization insights and efficiency scoring, helping Pizza Nova make informed, financially sound technology decisions.
- Rackspace Modern Operations: Provides ongoing operational management, keeping systems optimized and up to date.
“The Rackspace team was fantastic,” said Lameiras. “Their expertise and commitment helped us navigate a highly complex migration with ease. Despite the challenges, there were no disruptions — our stores experienced a seamless transition and were always connected to our database.”
Lameiras added, “They took the time to listen to our needs and goals. It was always a collaborative conversation, never assumptions. That made a real difference.”
With this transformation, Pizza Nova is now positioned for expansion, with plans to open new locations and grow beyond its current provinces.
“If we had just continued with our legacy systems, we could not have taken our business to the next level,” Lameiras explained. “Rackspace and AWS have unlocked new opportunities and given us the technology foundation we needed to grow in new and exciting ways.”
Pizza Nova’s 150 franchise-owned stores experienced a seamless technology transition and were always connected to the company’s massive single source of truth database.
About Rackspace Technology
Rackspace Technology is the multicloud solutions expert. We combine our expertise with the world’s leading technologies — across applications, data and security — to deliver end-to-end solutions. We have a proven record of advising customers based on their business challenges, designing solutions that scale, building and managing those solutions, and optimising returns into the future.
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