Case Study: Bluestem Brands achieves smooth microservices migration and scalable traffic handling with NGINX Plus

Bluestem Brands Migrates from Monolith to Microservices Efficiently with NGINX Plus

Bluestem Brands, a multi-brand online retailer based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, needed to improve site reliability and performance for brands like Fingerhut and Gettington. Three legacy sites ran a monolithic Apache/Tomcat stack that intermittently overloaded during peak traffic, causing connection failures and cascading retries that were hard to diagnose and tune.

The team migrated incrementally to microservices and put an NGINX Plus active-passive pair in front to serve static content, cache assets, and load balance traffic to backend app servers. This simple front-end layer reduced operational overhead, enabled automated Jenkins-driven deployments, supported blue‑green and canary releases, kept content synchronized, and delivered reliable performance during peak periods.

Bluestem

Dan Chamberlain

Principal Architect