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Oliver Wegner, TweetHead of Technical Product Development at OTTO E-Commerce
Biography: Oliver Wegner
Oliver has been working at OTTO E-Commerce since 2006 on establishing technology as a core competence at OTTO. To this end he built up an engineering organization and formed teams for software development, quality assurance and architecture.
In 2011 he started a project to replace the legacy Online Shop Otto.de with a new platform. Oliver wrote an article about this lightweight architecture published in the German Engineering magazine Objektspektrum and has spread these ideas to other IT divisions at OTTO. For more details see the dev+ops blog.
Twitter: @olliwegner
Presentation: TweetFrom Parts to a Whole: Modular Development of a Large-Scale e-Commerce Site
In this session, we will show how OTTO, Germany’s largest online fashion retailer, used a system-of-systems approach to enable modular, parallel development of its ambitious shop relaunch. We’ll talk about the Otto.de platform’s macro and micro architecture, the modularization into autonomous subsystems, as well as the challenges, both technical and organizational, in integrating the parts into a consistent whole using simple Web Technologies. Topics covered also include cross-cutting concerns such as an asset server, the approach to platform engineering and quality assurance, aggregation of front-end components including caching strategies, and the management of APIs and media types.
A green field approach based on open source components, a distributed architecture instead of a monolith, cross-functional and agile engineering teams with a strong devops focus, continuous delivery and fast feedback as the new culture on product development - these are the characteristics of OTTO's new online world. Launched in October 2013 the new shop managed the traffic peak before Christmas successfully.