Have you ever heard of the Ship of Theseus?
For those of you who are not so adept at Greek philosophy, this term refers to a thought experiment about whether or not a ship that has had all of its planks replaced would remain the same object. It is with this quandary that Franck Schmidlin, Senior Solutions Architect at The Very Group, introduces the concept of breaking down his company’s monolithic eCommerce platform — which could no longer meet the business’ goals — into individualized components and replacing each one bit by bit.
In this way, The Very Group underwent a huge tech transformation one step at a time — and succeeded in never disrupting the online shopping journey of their 4.8 million customers. The digital commerce “ship” continued as the retailer’s same web shop, but by replacing all the “planks,” the web shop’s underlying infrastructure became something entirely different.
At the heart of The Very Group’s new eCommerce system is the tried-and-true combination of commercetools running on AWS’s cloud-native architecture. Watch The Very Group’s journey to modern commerce as Franck describes the migration from the company’s previous monolithic architecture to the commercetools and AWS solution, all of the strengths of MACH (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) and composable commerce architecture, and the benefits this foundation has brought to the business.
[commercetools] is a MACH-compliant SaaS provider that is very specialized in eCommerce. We partnered with them because they're very good at what they do, so that gives us the best composable commerce component we can get currently on the market — and AWS. I've mentioned the Lambda function and API Gateway… all of these value-added services and that you can build architecture on top of.
Senior Solutions Architect, The Very Group
To dive deeper into why the combination of commercetools and AWS is the perfect match for your eCommerce solution, hop over to our blog post and download our AWS white paper.