VORWERK
mindcurv has worked with Vorwerk since the launch of their revolutionary connected kitchen device, the Thermomix®.
We help ensure that chefs can plan their cooking on the Cookidoo® app and then upload the recipes to the Thermomix® devices in homes and restaurants around the globe. With millions of users worldwide, the platform needed to hyperscale.
This case is about one of the aspects of our work with Vorwerk, namely how we made their global platform cost efficient & future-ready with Amazon EKS.
An Unwieldy Platform was Becoming Unmanageable
Vorwerk is a family-run German business, selling quality cooking and cleaning appliances in 79 countries. Across Europe, one in every two households owns a Vorwerk product.
Vorwerk’s Cookidoo® is a universe of online and offline communities, recipes, and essential resources. The platform has several million active IoT devices across 4 AWS regions (including China), with numerous production, non-production, prod-content staging, and dynamic self-managed sandbox environments. It has 65+ micro-services, 2 SAP Hybris installations, numerous Postgres, Redis, and NoSQL databases, and 100s of domains. But behind the scenes, platform costs were escalating rapidly and Vorwerk needed a counter-measure.
Bringing Vorwerk's Vision to Life
“You build it, you run it” is Vorwerk’s vision of the platform's future was. In addition to reducing costs, Mindcurv worked with Vorwerk to modernise the platform. This included improving the time-to-market, establishing self-reliant development teams, and facilitating a simpler approach to deployment with flexible testing capabilities.
Future-Ready with Amazon EKS
Migrating to Amazon EKS clusters reduced Vorwerk's infrastructure and licensing costs. The self-contained systems and standardised automated deployment patterns also improved time-to-market for development teams and gave them more ownership of the platform.
Its improved security model, managed control plane and cluster management features were additional benefits. The Mindcurv team followed a fail-fast doctrine and also supported and coached Vorwerk's development teams through the migration.
»Mindcurv’s Cloud Native experts helped us to unlock huge savings. On top of this, the team at Mindcurv helped groom a new community of build-run developers that take the reliability of our platform very seriously, with everyone focused on customer satisfaction.«
Platform Cost-Savings and Sustainable Development
Migrating to Amazon EKS resulted in the reduction of Kubernetes infrastructure costs by about 50% and an additional 7 digit savings in license costs. The existing 200+ nodes were brought down to around 84 nodes. We also improved the time-to-market and helped development teams become self-reliant through an easier deployment approach and flexible testing. The platform is now operating on Amazon EKS across 4 AWS regions, spanning about 50 countries:
- EU Central – handling whole of Europe and international markets
- Asia-Pacific – handling Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand
- US East – handling the USA, Canada, and Mexico
- Ningxia Province – handling China
