Deutsche Post engineers flexibility and scalability with Azure SQL Database Hyperscale

A world-leading, multinational logistics company

Deutsche Post DHL Group is the world’s leading logistic company. DHL offers a comprehensive range of parcel and international express service, freight transport, and supply chain management services, as well as e-commerce logistics solutions. Deutsche Post is Europe’s leading postal and parcel service provider. The group employs approximately 590,000 people in over 220 countries and territories worldwide and generated revenues of more than 81 billion Euros in 2021. Deutsche Post DHL Group is focusing on growth in its profitable core logistics businesses and accelerating the digital transformation in all business divisions. The Group contributes to the world through sustainable business practices, corporate citizenship and environmental activities. By the year 2050, Deutsche Post DHL Group aims to achieve zero emissions logistics. 

Meeting increased demand

DPDHL’s division Post & Parcel (P&P) Germany relies on their Track and Trace Parcel (TTP-B) system for all data regarding parcel deliveries. As a backend system, TTP-B allows internal services like customer service to track parcels and provide information to customers. “All of these systems need some part of the data we are storing in the back end to do their work,” says Jochen Fischer, Senior Software and Security Architect. The software tracks every parcel in the system—more than 1.8 billion per year. Around peak holidays like Christmas and Easter, the demand grows to 10-11 million parcels and 150-180 million parcel notifications every day. 

The company originally used an on-premises solution where it was responsible for software installs and patching. The on-premises solution worked well enough but would not be able to scale for the projected growth. The existing tracking backend including the import mechanism for tracking events was scalable, but the on-premises solution required 40 TB of disk space—a massive 80 TB of data when you account for redundancies. As traffic increased year-to-year, P&P Germany wanted to ensure that they could handle the significantly increased demand.

Building a better database

Microsoft and P&P Germany have an ongoing relationship, and the original on-premises solution worked with SQL 2016. Now, P&P Germany would need to build a proof of concept that could survive peak demand.  

P&P Germany selected Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, a SQL-based and highly scalable cloud service with up to 100 TB of storage, as the backend database replacement. It offers high throughput and performance, rapid scaling to adapt to workload requirements, and gave the company the ability to move to scalable cloud architecture with no changes to its database tier code. The proof of concept was successful, and the migration began.

The flexibility to innovate

Consumers are increasingly used to instantaneous responses from technology, so companies like P&P Germany are always looking for ways to minimize latency and make sure that users on the front end can quickly check the status of their parcel. The company needed a response time of less than half a second, but end-to-end system response time was in the 100-200 ms range. Since migrating to the Azure environment, the system has responded even faster despite the increase in traffic.

The speed of the Azure environment’s computing provides a key benefit: quicker processing means that even slower requests contribute to less of a backlog for the system to keep up with. Additionally, moving to the cloud makes for a much better experience when it comes to software updates. Previously in the on-premises environment, rollouts were combined with system downtime, but with modernization onto the Azure infrastructure, the system can handle most updates without any downtime at all. That means customers never experience a gap in service—new features simply appear for them. And they appear faster than ever, since Azure has also offered P&P Germany the flexibility to release several updates throughout the year as opposed to their former two.

Enhancing the parcel system

The team’s roadmap of improvements doesn’t end here. P&P Germany will continue to focus on delivering innovations quickly. One potential space for innovation is adding named replicas for read scale. Named replicas offer the flexibility to scale and cater to dynamic workloads, the ability for multiple application users to work in isolation, and cost savings with storage and read scale-out.

For now, Deutsche Post DHL Group is continuing its mission as one of the world’s largest couriers with the support of the Azure environment.

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