Digital platforms of tomorrow - from monolith to services

Monolithic architectures once provided several benefits in the digital space, including being easy to develop, deploy and scale horizontally. However, in today’s modern web, many monolithic applications are slow and complicated, which is why many organizations have shifted to a services-based approach instead.

In a Magnolia NEXT session, Ismael Garcia, Digital Technology Officer at Salling Group, provided some insights into how they consolidated multiple platforms into a singular service-based stack that’s Jamstack-enabled with the help of Magnolia’s content platform.

Salling Group, Denmark’s largest retailer, has grown throughout its over 100 years of existence to become a complex multi-entity corporation.

From humble beginnings as a single department store to the first Danish Supermarket, they have grown both internationally and digitally to become the Salling Group of today, with franchises for brands such as Starbucks and Carl’s Jr. as part of their offerings since the 2010s.

Garcia explains how their e-commerce business, in particular, has grown over the last 12 years through internal development and acquisitions, giving them an enviable portfolio in both brick and mortar stores and online formats.

Previously, their architecture spanned seven different platforms which meant additional costs and complexities to manage for multiple e-commerce segments and fulfillment platforms. It also meant that content requests for each platform needed to be handled separately.

Salling Group’s goal was to move from these legacy platforms to an aligned architecture that could simplify things as they continued to grow. Ismael then highlighted some of the features of their underlying tech stack including Netlify which is used for frontend deployments, the frontend frameworks they utilize including React and Vue, as well as some of the integrations they use for marketing, payments and monitoring.

Many of the services they use are built using Java, which is perfect for Magnolia’s Java-based CMS, used for managing content across multiple channels.

Around 2017, the Salling Group team decided to use Jamstack, since it allowed them to make atomic deployments and provided unlimited snapshots and rollbacks, which made it possible to A/B test different deployments.

Their monolithic architecture created several challenges for its e-commerce platform. According to Ismael, some of these challenges include high maintenance and development costs, a slow time-to-market for new functionality, difficulty in recruitment and an old on-premise design.

However, with a new services-based approach, their goal is to lower these costs and achieve a faster time-to-market with the introduction of modular service architecture. They can then leverage the flexibility of a new architecture to make it easier to hire skilled employees and ultimately consolidate all of the Salling Group’s e-commerce sites into a joint technology stack.

For Ismael and the team at the Salling Group, Magnolia’s DX architecture offered the perfect partner on their journey because of our headless CMS, ease of integration and ability to build a consolidated platform.

With Magnolia, they can customize the platform to suit existing business logic and workflows while also leveraging Jamstack and a WYSIWYG editor (SPA editor) that allows them to visualize and edit content for multiple channels. A headless CMS for Jamstack can be a major difference maker for brands today and Magnolia definitely delivers.

Watch the on-demand recording of the Salling Group talk at Magnolia NEXT: