Lulus ran their core business on a monolithic PHP 5.6 application — a system that had grown over years to touch nearly every part of the operation, from order management and inventory to customer data, fulfillment, and internal workflows. It worked, but it was aging, and bringing it forward meant carefully working through a large, interconnected codebase without disrupting a live platform that processes real orders every day.
The project centered on upgrading the application to the current version of PHP, which meant auditing years of legacy code, replacing deprecated APIs, modernizing database queries, and updating dependencies throughout the stack. Along the way, the platform’s integrations required attention as well — Stripe for payment processing, NetSuite for ERP and financial operations, and Elasticsearch for search and catalog management across a large, frequently changing product inventory. Google Cloud Pub/Sub handled asynchronous messaging between services, decoupling parts of the system that previously had to communicate directly and making the architecture more resilient under load. Additional third-party API integrations covered logistics, fulfillment, and other business-critical services that the platform depended on to operate.
Google Cloud also handled storage and data pipelines that other parts of the business relied on. Services were containerized with Docker, and deployments were moved into a CI/CD pipeline, replacing fragile manual release processes with a consistent, repeatable process. The team worked in an Agile environment throughout — sprints, code reviews, and regular collaboration with product and internal stakeholders to keep development aligned with business priorities.
Introduced a front-end testing framework utilizing Selenium to help catch bugs before each new deployment. Integrated alerts with pagerduty.com to receive alerts when the tests stopped working.
The result was a platform that was faster, more maintainable, and ready to support continued development rather than hold it back.