More innovative strength thanks to managed cloud operations with PCG

Why Bergfreunde.de operates its online store in Google Cloud

With the support of PCG, Bergfreunde.de has migrated their web store from on-premise to Google Cloud, and can now concentrate fully on the further development of its services thanks to PCG's management of the infrastructure. By operating the web store in the cloud, the company also benefits from greater reliability, flexibility and lower operating costs of around 15%.

Bergfreunde GmbH is an online specialist retailer of mountain sports, climbing and outdoor equipment. The product range comprises 40,000 items from over 900 brands for ambitious climbers, expedition mountaineers and sports and nature enthusiasts in the big city. The online pure player sells the range exclusively via the online store, which is individualized and localized for twelve European markets, including the Netherlands and France. The online outdoor retailer employs 650 people at its administrative site in Kirchentellinsfurt and logistics site in Ergenzingen near Tübingen.

At the end of 2021, Bergfreunde GmbH was faced with the challenge that the maintenance and operation of their web store was becoming too time-consuming, and reliability and flexibility left much to be desired. In order to meet the increasing demands, the company therefore wanted to move the web store from on-premise to the cloud.

The aim was to ensure a fast and smooth migration on the one hand, and the secure operation of the store in the cloud and continuous optimization on the other. At the same time, the workload for the internal DevOps team was to be kept as low as possible so that they could concentrate on further developing their services. Last but not least, the solution needed to be both cost-efficient and transparent.

With the assistance of PCG, Bergfreunde GmbH ported its web store from a classic VM-based solution to Kubernetes in order to simplify the management of components and improve the scalability of the store. In addition, the company opted for PCG's "Managed Cloud Operations" offering, which means that the entire responsibility for infrastructure operations was transferred to PCG. The Google Cloud experts now take care of monitoring the infrastructure components such as the GKE cluster or the Google Cloud SQL database. PCG also ensures that all infrastructure components are kept up to date. New features, pain points and potential improvements are discussed twice a week.

Thanks to the outsourcing of infrastructure management to PCG, the internal DevOps team now has more time for innovative ideas. The setup in Google Cloud makes it possible to implement new prototypes dynamically and without a long lead time, thus increasing innovative strength.

Another advantage of the solution is that it is less tied to one environment, which also allows Bergfreunde.de to experiment more and react in a more agile way to the constantly changing requirements of customers.

Furthermore, on-demand scaling in the cloud has led to significantly greater resource efficiency and a reduction in operating costs of around 15%. Cost transparency has also been improved and Bergfreunde.de can see on a daily basis how costs are incurred and how they are distributed and develop.

"One of the biggest advantages of migrating our web store to the Google Cloud is the ability to try things out without any lead time."

- Dennis Klein - Team Lead DevOps, Bergfreunde GmbH

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