ConfPad

This talk will tell the story of how our backend architecture evolved over the last 8 years. It will give insights into how we gradually moved from 2 monolithic services with lots of design flaws to a modern microservice architecture using several database technologies. Pitfalls, mission-critical situations, major challenges, as well as technology and topology decisions will be explained in the process. Besides all the architectural topics, I will also talk about team structure and how our deployment changed over the years. Switching from departmental to agile feature teams also had an impact on how we now have to design our microservices. This switch forced us to rethink our deployment strategy completely. In the early days we rented our servers from a hosting company in Germany, then we bought our own servers and ran them in two different data centers. Our newest strategy is to switch from virtual servers to containers running in our on-premise OpenShift cluster. The level of detail in visually representing our architecture will increase throughout the presentation as we approach the present.