Case Study
The Vorwerk Platform
The Vorwerk Thermomix® is a one of a kind kitchen appliance, supported by Cookidoo®, a universe of online and offline communities, recipes, and essential resources. The platform is simply gigantic, with several million active IoT devices across 4 AWS regions (including China), with numerous production, non-production, prod-content staging, and dynamic self-managed sandbox environments. The platform also boasts 65+ micro-services, 2 SAP hybris installations, tens of Postgres, Redis and NoSQL databases and 100s of domains.
Mindcurv was given an opportunity to drive a radical platform modernization effort for Vorwerk – the migration of Cookidoo® from a self-managed enterprise Kubernetes application platform and legacy services to Amazon EKS clusters. This shift had a specific focus on total platform cost-savings and the consolidation of processes and platforms.
Sector
Smart Appliance
Smart Platforms
Solution
Infrastructure Management
Cloud Architecture
Technology Partners
Kubernetes
Amazon EKS
Catalyzing Vorwerk’s Vision
Vorwerk’s goal was to reduce the overhead of the combined infrastructure and licensing costs of the self-managed enterprise Kubernetes application platform clusters of its massive IoT platform, running across multiple AWS regions. Another goal was to improve time-to-market for development teams and give them more ownership of the platform, through self-contained systems and standardized automated deployment patterns. This aligned perfectly with Mindcurv’s vision to help companies evolve through holistic value addition.
We partnered with Vorwerk to create and refine a meticulous plan to enable this vision, through fewer dependencies and more self-enablement. We also supported and coached Vorwerk’s development teams through this transition.
After Migrating to Amazon EKS, Vorwerk was able to reduce Kubernetes infrastructure costs by about 50 and realize 7 digits savings in license costs.
Migrating to Amazon EKS
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) provides a seamless approach to running containerized applications on Kubernetes, on the AWS Cloud. It enables efficient and standardized Kubernetes management infrastructure across different Availability Zones, removing the need to manage the control plane and much of the day-to-day operations process. While the former Kubernetes platform requires licensing and necessitates payment for infrastructure, regardless of deployment, Amazon EKS charges 10 cents/hr for the control plane and normal EC2 usage costs. Its better security model, managed control plane and cluster management features were additional benefits.
For DevOps, we used GitLab and Argo CD – best of breed for large scale CI/CD. A combination of docker based tools including OpenPolicyAgent and Kubeval validator was used for testing at each step of the build phase, following a fail-fast doctrine.
“
The commitment of Mindcurv’s Cloud Native experts was the key driver to unlock the huge savings potential of the initiative. On top of this, the team at Mindcurv helped groom a new community of build-run developers that take the reliability of our platform very seriously – all in favour of our customers’ satisfaction.”
Sven Gerlach
Product Owner Platform/Infrastructure, Vorwerk
The Outcome
The migration of Vorwerk’s Cookidoo® services to Amazon EKS clusters for Production and Non-Production environments was carried out without a hitch. Mindcurv’s efforts resulted in the reduction of Kubernetes infrastructure costs by about 50 and an additional 7 digits savings in license costs. The 200+ nodes running before were brought down to around 84 nodes in Amazon EKS. We also helped improve the time-to-market, empowered self-enabled development teams, facilitated an easier deployment approach and flexible testing feasibilities.
The new technology base for Thermomix® is tailored for Vorwerk’s vision of the platform’s “You build it, you run it” future. The platform is now operating on Amazon EKS across 4 AWS regions, spanning about 50 countries:
- EU Central – handling whole of Europe and international markets
- Asia-Pacific – handling Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand
- US East – handling the USA, Canada, and Mexico
- Ningxia Province – handling China
- The platform now runs on Amazon EKS in around 50 countries in 4 AWS regions (EU Central, Asia-Pacific, US East, and Ningxia Province, China)
The new technology basis for Thermomix® is tailored to Vorwerk’s future vision of the platform “You build it, you operate it”.
Would you like to implement a similar project and are you still looking for the right service partner? We are happy to take care of your Kubernetes cost optimization, whether with Amazon EKS or another Kubernetes solution – in any case you are well advised with us. The Mindcurv team supports you in the migration of Kubernetes applications up to platform scaling. We are looking forward to your contact!
Want to learn more about our services?
Related Projects
CASE STUDY
A Modern E-commerce Platform to Catalyze Online Growth for Schmalz
Re-platforming from the end of life Magento 1 to a new platform based on commercetools & Bloomreach, running on AWS, helps Schmalz grow, modernize and expand into new markets.
CASE STUDY
Netherland’s first B2B food services marketplace
We used MACH technologies to rapidly revolutionize communication, fulfilment, and growth within HORECA, innovatively using technology to solve business model challenges in F&B, in Europe.
