As an innovation leader, DPD Germany demonstrates how well a parcel service provider can use the digital possibilities for an optimal shipping experience: Thanks to digital services, DPD offers the greatest possible transparency and flexibility in parcel shipping. To this end, DPD set up a central Kubernetes infrastructure in Azure together with DATAGROUP.
The foundation of the new digital strategy was the creation of a uniform cloud platform for all future DPD services in order to standardize operational services and the development of new services.
Business use case
- Provision of information for customer apps & website, e.g. for tracking as part of shipment tracking
- Updating data from processes in the parcel lifecycle on the delivery side and communication between central data and end devices
- Central data hub with event-based real-time processing
Project setup
Depending on the project section, the project team comprises 10-15 people (DPD and DATAGROUP employees) and works agile in the sense of Scrum.
Regular meetings of a steering committee make it possible to review the results and incorporate desired changes at short notice.
The knowledge required for (further) development, maintenance and operation is built up redundantly in the DPD team so that the functionality of the solution is ensured even without DATAGROUP.
Specifications regarding security, process and working standards of DPD are continuously adhered to during the implementation of the solution and integrated into the solution.
Architecture description
- The depicted open source components and Azure Managed Services were realized 100% with IaC (Infrastructure as Code).
- Each environment (Dev to Prod) is equipped with the standard platform services to ensure monitoring, logging and analysis of the environment and the customer services it contains.
- Managed services are available based on customer requirements (e.g. Eventhub, PostGreSQL), which provide the required comprehensive functionalities.
- The customer services can consist of one or more pods to map the functionality.
- For technical reasons, these customer services can be extended with sidecar containers so that platform functionalities (e.g. networking, security) do not have to be mapped in the specialist applications.
- The managed services and open source components are set up, modified or deleted fully automatically via an infrastructure pipeline.
Customer benefits
"The standardization of our cloud platform gave us a high degree of flexibility in the development of new business processes and their adaptations."
Additional information
Project start: August 2018
Project duration: ongoing , currently 20 months
