Haufe Group - Customer Case Study

Haufe Group – with its brands Haufe, Haufe Akademie, and Lexware – is considered a pioneer of digital transformation in Germany and one of Germany's leading providers of digital workplace solutions and services, as well as offering education and training programs. The content engineering and development (CED) division of Haufe is responsible for internal applications and products for the target groups (e.g. mid- and large-size companies and consultants, layers). For the challenge of re-engineering one of those system and breaking the monolith down into microservices, CED chose a serverless approach for data processing. For Haufe it is important to have a scalable way for importing and exporting documents - at least over night, when all the products are querying for new content. Those pipelines use AWS Lambda, Step Functions and API Gateway to retrieve files from S3. The files are validated and enriched, then saved to relational database based on Aurora. With AWS Lambda, Haufe is able to reach document import rates they could not previously achieve, like importing 500,000 documents in less than six hours. The serverless microservices-based architecture also makes it easy to extend and change the import pipeline without breaking the workflow, allowing them to serve an import and export service which is available 24/7 and they only pay for it when they use it. That’s an important requirement because imports and exports happen in a irregular interval. Being flexible with the import workflows allows CED to be fast in changing the pipeline when the schema of the imported files might change. By choosing this approach CED is able to increase developer agility, while decreasing costs and maintenance.