Migrating the enterprise CMS of the world’s largest events company

Introduction/The Client

Our client, Informa, is the world’s largest events company and constituent of the FTSE 100.

Their core enterprise CMS, which is also white labelled and used by a number of companies, divisions and units throughout the group, was originally built on a monolith architecture, using the Ember framework for its front end and Groovy for its backend.

Because those technologies have started to become obsolete, they faced challenges in developer recruitment – a problem only likely to worsen as time went on. The platform also made inefficient use of cloud resources as it had not initially been developed as a cloud-native platform.

It was a monolith architecture with only some functions making use of AWS. The decision was taken to modernise and future-proof the platform through a migration to React on the frontend and node.js on the backend. A DevOps team from K&C also integrated AWS microservices, for optimal performance and use of resources in a pure cloud environment.

A microservices architecture also allows for more convenient and resource-efficient future updates and maintenance, as well as protecting against vendor lock-in as a strategic consideration.

The challenge

• Informa’s core enterprise CMS was built on a monolithic architecture, using increasingly obsolete technologies.
• Migration to React & Node.js required to future-proof the CMS and make it easier to hire web developers to work on it.
• The CMS also had to be migrated to a microservices architecture, allowing for future continuous deployment.
• The migration to microservices would also mean lower running costs. Because the original monolith architecture was not designed for a cloud environment.
• All of this had to be achieved without any down time.
• All services developed to support white labelling (to allow customization of platform for various divisions and businesses)

Tech Stack & DevOps Tools

React, node.js, microservices, AWS, React SSR, node.js, express, Spring webflux, GraalVM, AWS services (Cognito, DynamoDB, Lambda, Kinesis, Elasticsearh, SNS, SES and others)

Snap CI (Cloud-Based Continuous Integration tool) migrated to Jenkins with using on demand EC2 instances for builds. Implemented monitoring system on top of Prometheus, Grafana, Slack

Security – AWS WAF, DDOS protection

Why did Informa rely on K&C for this business critical migration mission?

As a business-critical development project, Informa entrusted a core part of the work to a K&C team thanks to our successful track record working together on other projects over a number of years.

Michael Krusche – CEO K&C

Working alongside Informa’s in-house development team as a team extension comprised of front-end developers and DevOps engineers, we migrated in iterations the legacy monolithic platform to a microservices architecture using React on the front-end and Nodejs on the backend.

The platform now makes more efficient use of cloud resources, both in terms of expense and performance and Informa can hire React and Node.js developers far more easily than the Ember and Groovy experts they previously required.

The platform is now both easier and cheaper to maintain in the present and future-proofed for years ahead and can be conveniently white-labelled by Informa’s various businesses and units.