The publishing house C.H. Beck was founded almost 250 years ago in Munich, and is therefore not only one of the oldest and most traditional publishing company’s in Germany, but also the market leader in the field of legal literature. However, with all its tradition, the company is updating its software infrastructure quite extensively so it can effortlessly compete with “hip” startups. The keywords here are cloud and microservices. Together with the digital agency dotSource, the publisher is migrating its processes to the cloud, using a smart mix of the commercetools platform and individual microservices.
You might be wondering, why now? After more than 15 years, the publishing company’s monolithic in-house development, which had grown up gradually, had come to an end and had to be updated. Their goal was to be able to develop future adaptations to market trends, their portfolio, and their own requirements faster and more cost-effectively. With the new infrastructure running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud, they are saving costs. Even though C.H. Beck does not look like the ultimate driver of innovation at first glance, it has its own infrastructure requirements: 14 million products and almost as many categories must be maintained and quickly accessible, with 2-5 million changes every day. Considering all this, there is no other option than a scaling platform like commercetools.
For the implementation, first the technical goals were agreed upon: The range of functions in the previous platform would be maintained, but decoupled as far as possible and divided into individual applications. Where possible, standard technologies would be used. These were then interwoven with a network of microservices. There was a big migration plan, according to project manager Dr. Carl Heinze, but the changes have been made step by step. In a 10-month implementation period, nearly 80 microservices were created in this way, which are now operating automatically in the Azure cloud. They complement the flexible API endpoints of the commercetools platform, which depicts standard functionalities such as product information, shopping cart and checkout.
Read our white paper to learn more about migrating to the cloud.