Client
Wolf GmbH
Industry
Manufacturing
Technologies
Node.js, Fastify, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Apache Kafka, MQTT
About the project
Wolf GmbH is a German company renowned for its expertise in heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and renewable energy solutions. With a legacy dating back to 1963, the company has become a key player in the field, offering a comprehensive range of products such as boilers, heat pumps, solar thermal systems, and advanced building management technologies. Wolf GmbH is widely recognized for its commitment to energy efficiency and sustainable practices, making it a leading choice for innovative HVAC solutions on both a national and global scale.
The client’s proactive approach to modernize legacy applications and digitalize operational processes showcases their commitment to staying competitive in a dynamic digital environment. Recognizing our proficiency, they’ve entrusted us as their partner to execute these strategic initiatives.
Challenges
Legacy system integration:
- Integrating with older systems that use outdated technologies, making data flow between microservices and legacy components complex.
- Ensuring seamless communication between modern microservices and legacy systems that may have limited API support or lack standardized protocols.
Data synchronization:
- Ensuring consistent and up-to-date data across different microservices, especially when updates occur simultaneously in multiple services.
- Handling scenarios where data inconsistencies arise due to network failures or partial updates in different microservices.
Managing data volume:
- Dealing with the challenges of processing, storing, and querying large volumes of data generated by multiple systems.
- Addressing potential bottlenecks and latency issues when transferring and processing large amounts of data between services.
Service discoverability and communication:
- Ensuring that microservices can discover and communicate with each other efficiently, particularly as the number of services grows.
- Implementing effective service discovery mechanism and load balancing to maintain reliable communication.
Dependency management:
- Handling dependencies between microservices, where changes in one service may impact others, potentially leading to cascading failures.
- Managing versioning and ensuring that changes to one microservice do not disrupt the functioning of dependent services.
Solution
Wolf Backbone is a backend solution structured as a microservice architecture that integrates various third party and legacy systems used within the organization. The new system monitors data changes across legacy systems, keeps data in sync, and exposes APIs that are used by frontend clients.
Legacy system integration:
- We implemented intermediary components that act as translators between modern microservices and legacy systems, converting data formats and protocols.
Data synchronization:
- Our team utilized publish-subscribe patterns and message brokers to propagate changes efficiently.
- We implemented distributed caching mechanisms to store frequently accessed data, reducing the need for repeated requests.
Managing data volume:
- The team utilized cloud-based storage solutions that offer auto-scaling to accommodate growing data needs.
- We optimized query performance, ensuring efficient data processing and retrieval even at scale.
Service discoverability and communication:
- We implemented container orchestration platforms to manage service discovery and load balancing.
- Our team integrated asynchronous communication patterns using message queues, ensuring decoupled services and reducing the risk of cascading failures.
Dependency management:
- We utilized containerization platforms to package microservices along with their dependencies, ensuring consistency across environments.
- Our team implemented API versioning to gracefully handle changes, allowing services to evolve independently without causing disruptions to dependent components.
Technologies used
Results
Despite the challenges, we successfully managed to implement and maintain around 10 microservices. The entire backend architecture integrates complex legacy systems, ensuring smooth operation of the company’s data.
Perspective
This system highlights our commitment to client satisfaction and our ability to adapt to complex challenges. It represents the core of the company backend on which other teams currently build other backend and frontend solutions. The system also serves as a technical guide to the growing technical department.
We looked forward to collaborating closely, elevating their digital infrastructure, refining workflows, and embracing innovation to achieve greater agility and efficiency.
