Kroger is in a difficult position -- Grocery is a low-margin space: it is the true "race to the bottom," and now, with Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods, and Target's acquisition of shipt (Kroger has looked at other delivery services, but, can't find one for the same price point), they're struggling to find the same portfolio matrix to keep them competitive to other startups.
They want to use GCE, but, they're truly struggling to use it. They refuse to use AWS for competitive reasons. They don't want to pay for talent (they were offering an Enterprise Architect $25/hour on a contract in the Cincinnati area , they don't want to pay for commercial tooling). Admittedly, in order for them to make money, they have to run truly Lean IT...but, they also make really foolish decisions. They were considering building their own cloud until it was pointed out just the sheer amount of capex needed for that project....and then the VMWare Licensing costs. They spend a crazy amount of money on SurePOS, but, then don't pay for any of the Verifone branding/customization/contactless enablement for their terminals. Technologies like LaneHawk help their cashiers catch shrink, but, their cashiers comment that it's ineffective and do not work 95% of the time.
If it was my job to move Kroger's technology forward, I'd probably do the following:
* Look at ways to help the cashiers do their job better and more effectively. Finding ways to shave transaction time will add up, enabling more customers per hour to flow through the transaction lines.
* Microservices in the store level for things that need to have store level availability, but, push things to cloud services where it's feasible. Yes -- let's buy bigger pipes to the cloud, but, keep a smaller server at the store in case things fail. We can manage that farm in the cloud more efficiently at scale, and then deploy out to the stores nightly or weekly versus continuous delivery in the cloud.
* Vendor Selection: Use the right vendors for the right things. Look at how you're spending your money with your vendors, and do a double check to make sure you're not being foolish with your spending (ala, vendors like Pomeory -- 99.99% of the time, you can do it better in house)