Wehkamp new Architecture Automates DevOps Operations

Leading e-commerce retailer Wehkamp is an online department store that mainly sells Dutch products and brands. The company was founded in 1952 as "Wehkamp's Fabriekskantoor" and initially customers ordered items (mattresses and bedding) by mail in response to advertisements in magazines. Today, the Wehkamp website attracts nearly half a million unique customers per day and the company sells more than 17 million products a year. The range consists of more than 300,000 different articles from about 2,500 brands, mainly in the categories of fashion, home, beauty, and baby/child.

Increasing Demands Created Bottlenecks

Wehkamp's skilled teams faced increasing business demands to continuously offer customers solutions and advice in an inspiring shopping environment. Although DevOps, Infrastructure as code, and containers were already very common terms for them, workload bottlenecks appeared. Deployments became hard to manage and the integration faced performance issues due to a non-scalable architecture, ultimately decreasing development speed and time to market as a whole.

Agile, Automated and Secure

The Wehkamp DevOps team needed a more agile, automated, and secure way to manage its CI/CD environment. Based on its vast expertise, Xebia redesigned our existing architecture and delivered a robust solution, said a Wehkamps spokesperson. The new architecture relies on Amazon EC2 Container Service, Jenkins with a High Availability Plug-in from CloudBees©, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudTrail.

Our new architecture allows us to operate in a state-of-the-art, automated, cost-effective, and reliable environment that follows best practices and uses the newest and most productive technologies. Thanks to Xebia, we now spend less time on ordinary management tasks and can instead focus on our rapidly changing business demands. - DevOps Lead, Wehkamp Increased resiliency.

Increased Resiliency

The new architecture has improved the resiliency of the application. By using the latest 
insights from the AWS Well-Architected Framework observability, uptime and performance 
have increased. Logs and traces are stored in OpenSearch cluster, and dashboarding based on 
Kibana and Grafana. Prometheus collects metrics from multiple sources, and alerts are 
raised when actions need to be taken. Downtime has a direct impact on Wehkamp's results, 
so resiliency and business continuity are taken seriously. Resulting in fewer incidents, zero data-loss, and also reduced mean time to repair.

Centralization Saves the Day

Instead of running scripts locally, Xebia helped us implement a centralized CD server to manage our deployments, said a Wehkamp spokesperson. He continued, The new design allows repetition as well as auto-scaling in the CI setup. Now, during peak moments, multiple servers can handle the load then scale down during quiet hours, which keeps our costs low. We also use Amazon CloudTrail to log API calls, which lets us create an audit track for compliance.