GoPuff, an online delivery service that offers consumers the convenience of ordering home goods, over-the-counter medication, food and drink with a few clicks of an app, has agility built into its DNA. And now, it’s paying off.

In the last 18 months, the company has more than tripled its footprint, rapidly spreading out from its Philadelphia home base to offer services in new cities including Dallas, Miami, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Houston.

That kind of scale, undertaken so quickly, requires architectures, systems, and networks that enable rapid development and seamless connection between front-end and back-end functions. And with more than 500 IoT-enabled facilities across the country, as well as a roadmap that includes delivery by autonomous drones, GoPuff has built the technological foundation to allow the company to not only adapt to changing consumer expectations, but anticipate them. In a year marked by blisteringly fast changes in retail business models, GoPuff’s built-in agility has served the company well.

During the recent Phorum conference, hosted by Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies (PACT), GoPuff Director of Engineering Chris Maenner joined Comcast Business Head of Product Bob Victor for a discussion on the technology underpinning GoPuff’s success.

During the session, Maenner and Victor discussed several of the elements that allow GoPuff to remain consistently ahead of the curve, including:

• How GoPuff leverages SD-WAN and microservices to constantly iterate and create purpose-built solutions for consumers in a rapidly changing environment

• GoPuff’s software-defined perimeter, which prevents security from hindering development speed while ensuring the correct levels of access and security from end-to-end

• GoPuff’s cloud-first, cloud-native approach, which allowed it to rapidly expand horizontally across the country and future-proofs innovation, allowing the organization to stand ready for new technology standards like 5G

• The organization’s future plans as it looks to 2021, including its readiness for autonomous product delivery

Watch the video embedded above to hear their conversation in full.