The cloud infrastructure that connected innovation to legacy systems without disrupting operations
Grupo Marista is a large independent education network with 96 locations across 21 Brazilian states and the Federal District. It operates private and social schools that serve thousands of students free of charge. With decades of history, it is recognized for educational quality and its commitment to social impact in Brazilian education. Over the years, each location and area of the group accumulated its own systems, each addressing the needs of its time. The network is operationally complex, and digital innovation requires geographically distributed legacy systems to communicate.
The Challenge
Launching a new digital service quickly is possible. Making it work across 96 locations with decades of different systems was another matter. Modernizing application deployment and unifying API governance across a group with legacy infrastructure required scalability and security without affecting the systems supporting daily operations at dozens of locations.
Grupo Marista needed to modernize quickly enough to support innovation without putting production systems that entire locations relied on at risk. Replacing everything at once would halt operations. Leaving everything unchanged would make each new digital idea dependent on integrating, location by location, with systems that could not communicate.
The Solution
Grupo Marista remained in charge of priorities, deciding which locations and services would move forward first. Radhark took end-to-end technical responsibility for the infrastructure foundation. The key decision was to separate governance from execution. Apigee X runs as a shared service in its own project, providing a single API governance layer for the entire group, with Cloud Load Balancing at the entry point. Each product, however, runs in an isolated project with its own GKE cluster and Application Integration, preventing a problem in one product from spreading to others.
A central host project with a production fleet, management cluster and GKE Fleet dashboard provides unified visibility without forcing all products into the same cluster. This combination enabled modernization without a single risky migration of all legacy systems at once. The architecture runs entirely on Google Cloud, providing scalability as the group grows.
The Result
Grupo Marista gained agility to launch new digital services, connecting innovation to legacy systems efficiently without repeating integration at every location or risking systems that supported existing operations. Modernization proceeded gradually, allowing each location to move at its own pace while central infrastructure supported the entire group.
For Grupo Marista's strategy, this means the ability to compete in the digital era without abandoning its inherited operational complexity. Innovation moved from a one-off project to an ongoing organizational process.
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