One-Click Deployments and Faster Analyses

Fashion retailer hessnatur migrated its on-premise online store and applications related to its web presence to the Google Cloud. With our support, they subsequently implemented a modern CI/CD pipeline that enables the company to make changes quickly. Furthermore, the company benefits from improved business intelligence (BI) thanks to faster data analysis.

Headquartered in Butzbach in the German state of Hesse, hessnatur is a manufacturer and retailer of sustainable fashion. With a total of six stores in Germany, including one outlet, the company's main focus is on the e-shop.

For a long time, hessnatur operated its SAP Commerce online store and numerous internal applications on-premises. But performing updates was costly and scalability was difficult, which is why they decided to migrate to the Google Cloud. Christian Steinhauer, head of e-commerce web management at hessnatur: "We have around 30 smaller applications or microservices internally. We initially migrated these ourselves into normal VMs. However, we quickly realised that we needed support." Due to performance- and demand-critical applications in connection with the store, the migration was to be implemented with as little downtime as possible. The goal was also to build a CI/CD pipeline and, as the project progressed, to improve data analytics using AI.

The fashion retailer successfully replaced the on-prem platform for its online store and migrated existing VMs to Kubernetes. With the support of Cloudwürdig, they then implemented a smooth CI/CD pipeline, using Google Cloud services such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Storage, Cloud Run and Load Balancer, and Spinnaker. Thanks to a well-structured dev, approve and live environment, changes can be tested and implemented quickly and easily.

Storing data in BigQuery also enables the BI analytics team to perform faster analysis. For example, for customer segmentations, grids are formed and predictions made based on certain parameters.

By migrating to the Google Cloud, hessnatur can access its own environment from anywhere in the world and at the same time improved security - for example, in terms of outsourcing access data. In addition, the cloud helps to easily manage peaks in demand in the online store and enables products to be exchanged more quickly. Christian Steinhauer: "We now have one-click deployments and our resources very well under control."

He is also enthusiastic about the topic of AI: "This was completely new territory for us. Their team built us several scripts in BigQuery. The calculation in Python ran on the servers for about 8h before, now it takes 24 min. That is really impressive. We can be proud of that."

PCG have supported us with the entire Google Cloud organisation and help us to constantly optimise it. The collaboration is excellent in this regard.

- Christian Steinhauer, Head of E-Commerce Web Management, hessnatur

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