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Shipping & Logistics
Modernizing and digitizing postal shipping capabilities
When it comes to mail, there is no room for error.
Technological transformation can be challenging, especially for companies with traditions dating back to the pre-information age. Founded in the 16th century, our client's organisation is one of the oldest postal services in the world. Given its heritage of absolute reliability and national importance, the company has been extremely cautious in technological modernisation efforts. Learn their story.
Client's Challenge
Before long, the platform received its largest client to date. Under normal circumstances, this would be cause for celebration. Instead, it resulted in a challenging situation.
The problem was two-fold. The business challenge was that the massive increase in throughput required by the new client would result a third party cost that exceeded the revenue from this account. The technical challenge was that the platform had not been architected to effectively support this level of scale.
Our client's leadership team scrambled for a solution. They needed a modern, scalable, and cost-effective platform that could provide the necessary reliability and scalability at reasonable operating costs.
Clurgo's Solution
Enterprises must often choose between open source and proprietary technology stacks. This is a nontrivial choice, as we describe in our blog post on the pros and cons of open source technologies. However, with the right guidance and expertise, open source solutions can offer a reliable and cost-effective alternative.
After careful consideration, we offered our client a plan for redesigning the platform. The proposed architecture consisted of several building blocks, as shown in Figure 1.
Fig. 1.: The new system for Poczta Polska
The microservices and their roles
Seamless updates
Not included in the chart, BlueGreen deployment is an approach to updates we implemented into the system. It enables seamless updates by continuous alternation between two identical copies of the software while it’s being updated.
Microservice communication
Microservices need to communicate for the whole system to function properly. To make sure that every microservice knows what the other is doing, Apache Kafka and Zookeeper coordinate information exchange between them, delaying delivery until the recipient service is ready to accept it.
Data safety
Keycloak handles authentication. The system is encrypted symmetrically and requires a two-part encryption key for entry. One part is the main password, the other is randomly generated for each file and stored in a separate database. Only a person who can provide both parts can read the files.
Storage management
All the files are kept in S3 Object Storage. Min.io manages them and performs regular back-ups for quick and easy recovery. Apart from a microservices architecture, which comes with built-in dependencies and container autofixing capabilities, this is another feature that ensures the system’s reliability.
Log management
Every application outputs copious amounts of logs. They can be ignored, but only until something goes wrong. When that happens, fixing the problem often requires finding the right log. Elasticsearch, Filebeat and Kibana comprise the ELK stack, an open source suite for easy log aggregation, visualization, and searching.
Results & Benefits
The rearchitected platform provided a 60% improvement in maintenance cost, a significant reduction in technical debt, and massive improvements in scalability. Our client was confident in taking on enterprise prospects of any size. In addition, the blue/green deployment scheme ensured continuous availability during releases and upgrades.
In this case, Clurgo's work and expertise resulted in positive impacts for millions of customers and a number of EU's most vital enterprises that rely on postal services as a core component of their business.
