Scalable web hosting with Amazon Web Services
Customer focus thanks to cloud redesign
VNR Verlag is one of the largest specialist publishers in Germany. The Bonn-based company has been making expert knowledge available to a wide audience since the 1970s. Having started out as a classic publishing house, VNR is increasingly focusing on reaching its customers digitally. Today the company operates hundreds of websites and online portals and develops solutions that combine classic fulfilment with data-driven, intelligent platform solutions.
One of VNR Verlag's digital products that is appropriate for the current times is the interplay of magazine and online portal at www.wegweiser-digitale-schule.de. Here VNR Verlag offers legal, ethical and educational content for, among others, headmasters and digital representatives who deal with the topic of digitisation in schools. In order to ensure the scalable growth of VNR's digital offering, all websites and portals have been consolidated to be future-proof in close cooperation with AWS and Arvato Systems experts.
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Technical solution
Technical solution
A Kubernet cluster using AWS EKS allows to consolidate all WordPress instances. The necessary data storage was implemented by using Amazon S3 and Aurora Serverless. The delivery of the websites is ensured by the Content Deliver Network of AWS (Cloudfront) and secured by a Web Application Firewall (WAF). Thus, processing, data storage and delivery are decoupled and scaled independently of each other.
In the new architecture, the individual websites are rolled out automatically with the help of a CI/CD pipeline. Both Word Press plug-ins and themes are integrated into the containers. Automated tests are already carried out when the container images are built. This ensures that only tested plug-ins and themes are used. Updates can be rolled out centrally.
In order to be able to implement changes quickly and with low risk, the containers are first rolled out in a Dev and PreProd environment. This enables the VNR developers to carry out a smooth control in cooperation with the commercial departments. -
Used Services
Used Services
- VPC
- ALB
- EC2
- ECR
- EKS
- Codebuild
- Codepipeline
- Aurora Serverless
- Cloudfront
- Route53
- IAM
- Cloudformation
- Parameter Store
- Certificate Manager
- KMS
- kubernetes
- helm
- alb-ingress
- cluster-autoscaler
- kube2iam
- prometheus
- grafana
Result
The automation factor achieved allows VNR to focus on the integration of the digital products into the company's digital platform, increasing cost-efficiency while improving security.
The redesign in the AWS cloud now allows VNR to benefit from higher system performance, which not only has a positive impact on the customer experience, but also improves the page speed index without code optimization. Thanks to multi-data center clustering, the risk of unavailability of individual services has been minimized.
VNR was also able to set up IT processes more efficiently. The product deployment process was professionalized and automated, landing page deployment processes now run more efficiently with near-time synchronization. The Tiny-URL service (Yourls) is now available as standard and certificate renewals are handled completely automatically.
Customer benefits
The decision to use the AWS Cloud as the basis for our DevOps development has proven to be the right one. Thanks to the integration of Arvato Systems, we were able to start directly with the implementation in parallel to our own knowledge build-up and thus gain significant time. The architecture quality created in this way allows us to continue to develop at an ever-increasing pace in our ongoing collaboration.
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