No limits: When a migration to the cloud transforms your tech teams

Description

OTTO started its business in 1949 as a catalogue retailer. Seventy years later, with seven million active customers and an annual revenue of 3.2 billion euros, it’s Germany’s biggest online retailer for home furnishings and one of the biggest ecommerce companies in the world. Over the last years, OTTO invested heavily in the scalability of its frontend platform, adopting DevOps and agile methodologies, and leveraging the benefits of building autonomous product teams around a highly scalable microservice architecture.

After running into scalability issues, last year OTTO was able to migrate its ecommerce frontend, which consisted of more than 160 individual services built by 25 teams and spread across more than 3,000 servers or application containers, to the cloud in the record time of just under 12 months—without downtime and without slowing down feature development. Daniel Barthelmes explains how it was possible for OTTO to pull off migrating its last service on the day it said it would a year earlier without falling back on the dark side of centralized governance and waterfall project management.

Daniel details the technical architecture and skills necessary to leverage the potential of the cloud and dives into the organizational challenges that go with such an undertaking, which are by their very nature much harder to predict and overcome. He highlights the culture of OTTO’s development teams, an organization that’s prepared for high performance under constant change.