Continuous Deployment

Case Study: OTTO

For our second case study, we will look at continuous deployment at OTTO. Tom Vollerthun is an executive professional software developer (although he isn’t entirely convinced job titles are helpful, he remarks), and he has been working at OTTO as a software engineer and technical team lead for over 10 years. Here is Tom’s overview of OTTO’s approach to continuous deployment.

OTTO’s Context

OTTO is one of the biggest European retailers and ecommerce shops. At the time of writing this, it has over 6,100 employees, 14.5 million products (~26 million variations), and 20,000 brands from over 5,000 partners. The platform itself receives up to 6 million qualified visits per day and up to 10 orders per second.

OTTO’s engineers are organized into 60 autonomous Agile teams working on the Otto.de website, with several more in backend or IT departments. Collectively, they achieve more than 60 deployments to production per day through continuous deployment.

Within OTTO, I have recently changed to the team that’s responsible for making product data available to external marketing partners like Google Shopping, Twitch, and Facebook as well as price comparison portals like Billiger.de. The product data is filtered and converted according to the adjustable configuration of business departments, exported into over 70 formats, and updated several hundred times per day. My most recent previous teams were responsible for personalized recommendations within the shop as well as a real-time ...