Olo: Modernizing an enterprise restaurant platform with .NET, AWS, and AI-enabled engineering
Olo, the open SaaS platform serving 800+ restaurant brands across approximately 90,000 locations, partnered with Vention on a large-scale modernization program that incorporated AI into day-to-day software delivery. Vention engineers used Claude Code for migration, implementation, and investigation, with task-specific AI Skills and a structured review process for every AI-generated change before deployment.
Over 14+ months, eight Vention engineers worked within Olo’s broader engineering organization across seven product and infrastructure workstreams. The engagement included migrating legacy .NET Framework 4.8 applications, initially to .NET 8 and subsequently to .NET 10, modernizing frontend applications with Next.js, moving the acquired Spendgo platform from Amazon EC2 to Amazon EKS, and strengthening CI/CD and deployment workflows while product development continued.
The partnership helped complete major modernization work, restore a blocked release pipeline, improve developer onboarding, and introduce repeatable AI-enabled engineering practices for legacy migration and production development.
Client overview
Olo is an open SaaS platform that helps restaurant brands increase orders, streamline operations, and improve the guest experience through integrated ordering, payments, loyalty, and guest engagement. In September 2025, software investor Thoma Bravo took Olo private in a transaction valued at about $2 billion. The modernization program continued under its ownership.
Olo serves 800+ restaurant brands across approximately 90,000 locations, processes more than 3.5 million orders per day, and integrates with 450+ restaurant technology partners.
As the business expanded, including through the December 2025 acquisition of loyalty platform Spendgo, Olo launched a modernization program to upgrade legacy applications, standardize its cloud infrastructure, and improve engineering workflows.
Olo needed to modernize business-critical systems while continuing to deliver new product functionality and maintain the reliability and performance required to process millions of digital orders every day.
Key stats
Partnership duration
14+ months, ongoing
Vention team
8 engineers
Engineering streams
7 concurrent modernization initiatives
Infrastructure modernization
Spendgo platform: Amazon EC2 to Amazon EKS
CI/CD modernization
Jenkins to GitHub Actions; Bitbucket to GitHub
Delivery model
AI-enabled: Claude- and Cline-based agents, shared prompts and Skills, with engineer review of every AI-generated change
The challenge
Olo needed a partner with experience in legacy application modernization to update its applications, infrastructure, and delivery processes while ongoing product development continued.
The program involved parallel workstreams across application, infrastructure, DevOps, and frontend modernization. Legacy technologies, including .NET Framework 4.8, EmberJS, EC2-hosted infrastructure, and Jenkins-based deployment pipelines, slowed development and added operational complexity.
Following Olo’s acquisition of Spendgo in December 2025, the company also needed to migrate the independently operated platform into Olo’s centralized AWS environment. The migration had to maintain production stability while supporting multiple distributed engineering teams.
Developer onboarding presented another challenge. Outdated documentation, missing permissions, broken automated tests, and inconsistent local development environments slowed new engineers and added operational overhead.
Key objectives included:
- Modernize legacy backend and frontend applications
- Migrate infrastructure from Amazon EC2 to Kubernetes on Amazon EKS
- Replace legacy CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions
- Improve developer onboarding and local development environments
- Maintain uninterrupted product delivery throughout the modernization program
- Establish repeatable AI-enabled engineering practices
Our solution
Working across application development, platform engineering, DevOps, and infrastructure, the Vention team worked within Olo’s engineering organization and contributed to each major modernization initiative.
Modernizing the .NET platform
Vention supported the migration of backend services from .NET Framework 4.8 to modern .NET releases. Engineers validated migrated functionality, resolved compatibility issues and regression failures, and supported production rollbacks when necessary.
Core services included:
- SMS Sending Service
- Privacy Service
- Heimdall Service
The migration improved maintainability and reduced long-term technical debt.
Frontend transformation with Next.js
Vention also contributed to Olo’s migration from Ember.js to Next.js, modernizing the restaurant ordering experience alongside the backend work.
Engineers helped build the new Serve-Next experience for restaurant procurement and vendor ordering workflows. The work updated the user interface and simplified future feature development.
Spendgo migration to AWS
After Olo’s acquisition of Spendgo in December 2025, Vention worked closely with Olo’s engineering team to integrate the platform into Olo’s AWS environment and align it with the company’s engineering standards.
The Vention team:
- Designed the initial Amazon EKS infrastructure
- Built GitHub Actions deployment pipelines from scratch
- Migrated legacy EC2 deployments to Kubernetes
- Supported three core Spendgo applications across Java, Scala, and frontend services
- Coordinated implementation across globally distributed engineering teams
The new architecture moved Spendgo onto Olo’s Kubernetes-based infrastructure and simplified ongoing platform operations.
CI/CD modernization
To improve release reliability and deployment automation, Vention developers replaced legacy delivery pipelines with GitHub-based workflows.
Key improvements included:
- Migrating from Bitbucket to GitHub
- Migrating from Jenkins to GitHub Actions
- Restoring a blocked release pipeline affected by an outdated browser and testing dependencies
- Modernizing the automated UI testing infrastructure
- Improving continuous integration and deployment workflows
Restoring the blocked release pipeline allowed product delivery to continue and gave engineering teams a more reliable deployment process.
Product delivery and platform enhancements
Alongside the modernization work, Vention continued to deliver customer-facing features and platform improvements across multiple product areas, which enabled Olo to maintain its active product roadmap throughout the engagement.
Notable contributions from our engineers included:
- New billing export capabilities
- Invoicing UI improvements
- Backend API enhancements
- Restaurant and catering app modernization
- Accessibility (ADA) improvements
- Menu and header redesigns
- Production bug resolution
Vention engineers also used Claude-based agents to investigate a production issue affecting restaurant tipping workflows. We traced the root cause to a configuration setting instead of a code defect and restored the expected behavior.
Developer enablement and DevOps
Vention also modernized local development workflows to make onboarding and day-to-day engineering easier.
The Vention DevOps team:
- Created sanitized local databases using staging backups
- Improved local container environments
- Resolved onboarding issues caused by outdated documentation and permissions
- Supported internal enablement for Amazon EKS deployments
The changes simplified local setup and addressed several issues that had been slowing down new engineers.
Results
Over 14 months, Vention’s AI-enabled delivery team supported across application development, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, and production operations.
Vention helped Olo:
- Introduce AI into day-to-day engineering, using Claude- and Cline-based agents for migration, incident investigation, and implementation, with shared prompts, reusable AI Skills, and engineer review of every AI-generated change
- Migrate three core backend services from .NET Framework 4.8 to .NET 10
- Move three core Spendgo applications across Java, Scala, and frontend services from Amazon EC2 to Amazon EKS and build their GitHub Actions deployment pipelines from scratch
- Restore a blocked release pipeline and keep product releases running throughout the modernization program
- Replace Jenkins and Bitbucket with GitHub Actions and GitHub while continuing to deliver billing export, invoicing UI, backend API, and ADA accessibility improvements
- Rebuild local development environments with sanitized staging databases and container setups, addressing issues that had slowed developer onboarding
Area | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
Release pipeline | Blocked | Restored |
CI/CD | Jenkins on Bitbucket | GitHub Actions on GitHub |
Spendgo infrastructure | Independent Amazon EC2 environment | Amazon EKS within Olo’s AWS environment |
Backend | .NET Framework 4.8 | .NET 10 |
Developer onboarding | Outdated documentation and missing permissions | Sanitized local databases and containerized environments |
The partnership continues as Vention supports Olo's long-term modernization strategy, helping the company evolve its cloud architecture, engineering workflows, and AI-enabled software delivery practices.
Our partnership with Vention allows us the flexibility to support recent acquisitions and global expansion with competent engineers across various stacks and technologies.
We've come back to Vention on a number of recent expansion opportunities and will continue to in the future."
Jason Ordway
CTO at Olo
Tech stack
Stack layer | Technology |
|---|---|
Backend | .NET Framework 4.8, .NET 10, Java, Scala |
Frontend | Next.js, Ember.js |
Cloud | AWS EC2, Amazon EKS |
Containerization | Kubernetes |
CI/CD | GitHub Actions, GitHub, Jenkins, Bitbucket |
AI Engineering | Claude, Cline |
DevOps | Docker, Kubernetes |
AI | Claude, Cline |
FAQs
How can enterprises modernize legacy platforms without slowing product delivery?
At Olo, eight Vention engineers worked across seven concurrent modernization workstreams, including .NET migration, Next.js frontend modernization, the Spendgo migration from Amazon EC2 to Amazon EKS, CI/CD modernization, and developer onboarding. Olo continued delivering new product functionality throughout the engagement.
Vention engineers worked within Olo’s engineering organization across application development, platform engineering, DevOps, and cloud infrastructure. Parallel workstreams allowed modernization and ongoing product development to continue at the same time.
How did Vention simplify the integration of an acquired platform into Olo's cloud environment?
After Olo acquired Spendgo in December 2025, Vention helped migrate the platform from Amazon EC2 to Amazon EKS and integrate it into Olo’s centralized AWS environment. The team designed the initial Amazon EKS infrastructure, built GitHub Actions deployment pipelines from scratch, and supported three core Spendgo applications across Java, Scala, and frontend services.
The migration moved Spendgo onto Olo’s Kubernetes-based infrastructure and simplified ongoing platform operations.
How can AI accelerate enterprise software modernization without compromising code quality?
Vention integrated AI into everyday engineering workflows for migration, investigation, implementation, testing, and debugging. Engineers used Claude- and Cline-based agents alongside shared prompts and reusable AI Skills.
We reviewed every AI-generated code change before deployment and remained responsible for the resulting implementation. The workflow gave engineers AI support across development while keeping code review and validation in their hands.