Inside Mondelēz’s Cloud and AI Transformation

In recent years, Mondelēz International’s IT environment has significantly evolved to better support innovation. Where provisioning a single server once took weeks due to manual processes, fragmented security, and outdated technology, Mondelēz has undertaken a massive transformation to streamline systems.

To achieve their goal of becoming a digital snack leader, Mondelēz developed a bold plan to assemble a world-class cloud engineering team and partner with AWS to reimagine their technology foundation. First, Mondelēz migrated a global deployment of over 1,000 servers onto AWS from on-premises (colocation) and legacy cloud environments into four AWS Regions, while hundreds of servers were decommissioned. During this migration the company saved cost and simplified its environment by migrating from Windows/SQL Server to Amazon Aurora Postgres.

“Our migration enables growth by improving our agility and cost efficiency, while advancing our automation and reliability objectives. AWS is also aligned to our corporate sustainability goals through their focus on renewable energy. For example, we’re leveraging AWS Graviton processors in both server-based and serverless workloads, which offer up to a 60% energy reduction compared to x86 based instances.” said Chris Hesse, Chief Technology Officer, Mondelēz International.

Historically, Mondelēz operated a legacy on-premises SAP ERP system and an SAP estate on another cloud provider, and experienced recurring capacity and scalability issues. They previously had around 80 production SAP System IDs across three regions, each with their own unique characteristics. That meant multiple technology stacks, vendors, support contracts, and historical ways of operating.

“We spent a lot of time evaluating our decision for our SAP S4/HANA program and whether we would move onto SAP RISE, a managed service, or host it ourselves,” said Hesse. “We decided it was important for us to align to the SAP strategic direction, which is RISE. The choice to pick AWS was an easy one because we believe AWS is the most secure, most reliable cloud platform, and it aligns with our internal cloud platform engineering team for the rest of our business-critical applications.”

“We’ve migrated a lot of the most difficult legacy systems, including hundreds of workloads from our legacy data centers and cloud environments. Leveraging AWS's cloud infrastructure and services helps us achieve greater security, agility, and reliability for our operations, especially as we are migrating our most business-critical systems, including our ERP landscape to SAP RISE on AWS,” said Sean Tibor, Director of Global Cloud Engineering, Mondelēz International.

Like many global enterprises undergoing digital transformation, Mondelēz International faced challenges in scaling its technology capabilities, specifically recruiting and onboarding cloud engineers quickly enough to meet growing demand and enabling their existing engineering talent to work more efficiently. "With all the key strategic priorities we've been tasked with, finding ways to speed up and make engineers more agile and giving them capabilities was our number one priority," said Tibor. 

To address these challenges, Mondelēz turned to Amazon Q Developer, an Agentic AI-powered assistant, as part of its AWS cloud transformation. The company integrated the service into its daily workflows, starting as a small team pilot, then expanding to its entire developer organization, who relies on the service to improve productivity and accelerate onboarding.

Mondelēz developers have free reign to use Amazon Q Developer across any project in the company’s environment. An internal AI review board approved the decision after ensuring that Amazon Q Developer is compliant with Mondelēz policies. Encryption keys secure sensitive data, engineering leaders monitor usage, and central configuration disables training for outside use cases. The service resulted in improved security practices by assisting in writing and refining IAM policies, generating security configuration policies when creating new resources, and identifying and fixing insecure configurations in infrastructure-as-code (IaC). 

“We’ve gone through a period of rapid growth and onboarding many engineers in a short space of time and getting them up to speed as quickly wouldn’t be possible without an AI assistant like Amazon Q Developer. In addition to writing code, our engineers use this almost as a tutor that can answer their questions, like ‘how do I do this’ or ‘explain this AWS service.’ It’s improving their ability to onboard onto our code base and to be effective faster. I’m seeing engineers become productive members of our team in days rather than months as it was before,” said Tibor.

Mondelēz has progressed on its Agentic AI journey to the point of launching its own MCP (Model Context Protocol) for interacting with Amazon Q Developer and some of its internal systems. “Having our MCP built into the command line where you can talk to our IaC module repository to get the exact template for generating source code is amazing. Now we’re looking to add some features with our observability platforms where you can ask questions about the infrastructure and see how it’s performing and whether there’s a health outage,” said Tibor.

In addition to code creation, engineers ask Amazon Q Developer to validate and test code generated by the tool or a human. “We’ve seen a speed up, not just in generating code, but in validating the code before it goes into development. Combining IaC management and AI tools has also sped up server provisioning, which used to take seven to ten days. Fully compliant servers are now ready in about 20 minutes,” said Tibor.

"Amazon Q Developer changes our mentality around what's possible. It's become so integral that 'Have you asked Q about this?' is now a common question across our team," said Tibor. “One of the things we really like about it is that it gives us the ability to control a lot more of our AI usage, ensuring the security of the sensitive data within our space, specifically the source code and our cloud engineering team’s configuration.”

“Our engineering team experience 2-3X productivity gains by using Amazon Q Developer. The service helps us quickly go from an idea to a working prototype extremely fast. Amazon Q is especially great at helping us to convert legacy code bases into modern replacements.”

Chris Hesse, Chief Technology Officer, Mondelēz International

Mondelēz International has undergone a bold transformation, made possible by assembling a world-class cloud engineering team and partnering with AWS, which has helped them reimagine their entire technology foundation.

Today, Mondelēz operates a fully automated cloud in which launching a new application environment—from account creation and secure networking to hardened, compliant EC2 instances—takes less than an hour with zero manual intervention. This platform is not only highly secure and resilient but also enforces hundreds of security controls and compliance policies by default, integrates seamlessly with global identity systems, and empowers engineers to innovate with speed and confidence.

The result is a dramatic leap in agility, security, operational efficiency, and sustainability, enabling Mondelēz to deliver new digital solutions on a global scale and position itself as a true leader in digital transformation within the consumer-packaged goods industry.

“If you treat a cloud as a virtual data center and as a managed service, all the clouds look the same. You see the difference with AWS when you automate and integrate all the cloud services together to create solutions for the business. For Mondelēz, AWS is the cloud platform which allows us to build secure, reliable solutions that we can quickly leverage to bring value to the business,” said Hesse.