Case Study: Zalando achieves scalable, high-availability order processing for 16M active customers with Camunda

Execution of all online orders world-wide

Zalando, Europe’s largest online fashion platform serving over 16 million active customers, faced a highly complex "Take order process" that spanned coupon checks, payment providers, stock and logistics systems, fraud checks and ERP integration. The original self-developed process framework had diverged from documentation, scattered logic across systems, and made the core order flow almost impossible to understand or maintain. To address this, Zalando adopted the Camunda BPM platform in 2014 to centralize and execute its customer order processing.

Using Camunda, Zalando modeled the entire process in BPMN, built end-to-end and integration tests, and deployed a high-availability runtime with frontend load balancers and backend job nodes. To scale, order data was sharded across eight identical databases with one Camunda Process Engine per shard, enabling synchronous checkout processing under 300 ms. As a result, the documented BPMN now corresponds 100% to the technical reality, day-to-day questions are resolved by inspecting diagrams, and Zalando can continuously improve and reliably scale its order processing with Camunda.

Zalando

André Hartmann

Java developers