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Otto Group IT Cloud-native attachment service platform
OTTO Group IT
Customer
Otto GmbH & Co KG
Industry: E-commerce
Headquarters: Hamburg
Your contact
Rouven HomannMember of the Board, cimt Group
Consulting activities
The project involved:
- Comprehensive redesign of the system architecture.
- Implementation of two cloud-native services for processing and virus scanning file attachments.
- Compliance with data protection regulations (GDPR) and other legal requirements.
- Compliance with complex operational standards.
Quantifiable benefits
- Scalability: The Attachment Service processes well over 100,000 attachments per month.
- Multi-tenant readiness: Four different clients are already using the Attachment Service. Several more clients are expected to join in the near future.
- Security: Modern two-layer encryption has eliminated vulnerabilities and makes the Attachment Service GDPR-compliant.
- Availability: As users are now decoupled from the proprietary document archive, the entire process achieves an availability of at least 99.99%.
About the customer
Otto Group IT is the central IT service provider for the Otto Group, an international group of companies active in online retail, brand concepts, financial services and more. The group employs more than 41,000 people and generates annual revenue of over EUR 16 billion.
The challenge: original state of attachment handling
As the OTTO web shop moved to a platform approach, the need to improve customer support and interaction with platform partners emerged, particularly where file attachments such as images were concerned. The original architecture had several limitations:
- Customers could not attach images or other files directly via the support contact form.
- The proprietary document archive storing the attachments was occasionally unavailable due to technical restrictions.
- Attachments were not sufficiently encrypted, so the system did not comply with legal regulations.
The customer’s brief
Otto Group IT was looking for a centralised, GDPR-compliant solution that was consistently available and overcame the limitations of the old system. Essential features included virus scanning, file type checking (e.g. JPEG, PNG or PDF), sufficient encryption, multi-tenancy and adherence to complex operational standards.
Architectural and functional highlights
The solution uses a modular “pipes and filters” architecture with AWS Lambda functions as real-time, event-driven components. Data storage and processing state tracking are handled with AWS DynamoDB and S3. The entire service is fronted by a Spring Boot REST API running on a load-balanced ECS cluster. AWS SQS is used for messaging and AWS KMS for encryption key handling and rotation.
Key functionality
TheAttachment Service provides the following key functionalities:
- Upload: A client can upload attachments. The upload includes securely receiving the attachment, followed by additional security checks performed asynchronously on the uploaded file.
- Checking the processing state:While the upload and security checks are being processed, the client can query the Attachment Service for real-time updates on the current processing state.
- Download: A client can download an attachment once the initial upload and security checks have been completed successfully.
- Metadata modification: A client can change the attachment’s metadata once the initial upload and security checks have been completed successfully.
- Deletion: When uploading an attachment, a client must specify a retention period based on legal or operational requirements. Once the retention period expires, the attachment is deleted automatically.
- Virus scanning: As the attachments had to be scanned for viruses, the well-known Linux-based virus scanner ClamAV was used and fronted with a custom REST API so that it can be queried programmatically. As this could be very useful for other teams in the future, we built a separate service for it instead of simply integrating it into the Attachment Service.
Conclusion
The new Attachment Service by Otto Group IT has introduced a new approach to attachment management. It is based on a GDPR-compliant, cloud-native, modular architecture that is highly available, scalable and secure. It resolves the limitations of the original system and offers a future-proof, extensible solution that sets a new industry standard. The project marks a significant step forward in managing, storing and securing attachments within the OTTO platform ecosystem.
References
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