Vorwerk Perfects Production Readiness with Load and Performance Testing

Challenge

Vorwerk needs their DevOps teams to run performance tests against their microservice-based web applications to ensure high speed of delivery and consistent quality while increasing awareness for infrastructure sizing and cost.

Solution

The company chooses StormForge to empower DevOps teams to autonomously test for non-functional requirements of their systems. This way aspects like performance, scalability, and right-sizing of infrastructure are guaranteed. Vorwerk ensures consistent quality by utilizing regular fully automated performance testing with StormForge in CI/CD pipelines.

Benefit

With StormForge, Vorwerk democratizes performance testing and lays out the foundation to create a sustainable culture of performance, efficiency, and cost-awareness. The “time to first test run” is dramatically reduced (<1hr) which leads to increased test coverage and frees up time. Overall quality is increased, and operational costs are optimized while confidence in business-critical use cases is strengthened.

Make Cooking Effortless and Deliver Thousands of Delicious Recipes Instantly

Vorwerk is a family-owned business founded in 1883 and one of the most iconic German brands for high quality and user-friendly household appliances. Today it is mostly known for Kobold vacuum cleaners and Thermomix®. In 1980 the first Thermomix® hit the market and made food preparation much easier and more convenient.

With the launch of Cookidoo® in 2016 Vorwerk connected the Thermomix® to a world of thousands of official recipes by now. Vorwerk itself places the highest demands on the quality of its products and Cookidoo® is no exception. The platform behind Cookidoo® has to be highly available and very responsive to ensure an excellent consumer experience with Thermomix® every day.

To meet the growing demand in countries like Australia, Taiwan and Mexico, Vorwerk has built an Edge Layer consisting of hundreds of microservices in multiple AWS regions (including Europe, Sydney, and US East) to bring Cookidoo® closer to customers.

Almost 60,000 recipes are available on Cookidoo® and every day millions of meals are cooked with Thermomix® backed by 90 million search requests per week.

More than 300 Million Requests per Day Handled by 18 Self-Contained Systems in the AWS Cloud

Vorwerk started using AWS in 2015 with Elastic Beanstalk. New services are regularly evaluated to drive innovation and services like DynamoDB, S3 and CloudFront were adopted.
One reason for choosing AWS is the large number of reliable and mature products and services. Furthermore, AWS understands the high standards Vorwerk needs to deliver to customers worldwide. 80% of all workload is delivered with AWS.

Vorwerk used to rely on interconnected, monolithic components which began to cause problems with organizational scaling. A self-contained systems (SCS) approach was chosen to decouple Vorwerk’s services and components to increase their ability to innovate at a significantly faster speed. Adopting DevOps methodology was also identified as a key driver for success.

To support teams at Vorwerk and allow them to focus on business value delivery at the demanded quality they are encouraged to rely on SaaS products (like StormForge for performance testing) for every step of their development process. This gives all teams at Vorwerk the ability and confidence to carry out a “You build it, you run it!” approach.

Deliver Self-Contained Systems in High Quality at DevOps Speed

While transforming from monolithic components to microservices and finally to a consistent self-contained systems approach Vorwerk was challenged to continuously deliver high-quality software in short release cycles. While connecting hundreds of thousands of Thermomix® TM6 devices to the Cookidoo® platform, ensuring high performance and cost efficiency became ever more business critical – not only for Cookidoo® but also for future products.

Performance testing is a crucial practice to ensure Vorwerk’s high-quality standards. Doing it on a regular basis and continuously is the only way to deliver consistent high quality in an ever-changing environment.

Perfect Services for a Perfect Experience

AWS helps speed up the delivery of new features and releases by providing flexibility and a large number of services for all kinds of use cases. Environments can scale automatically to serve consumer needs while DevOps teams can access all AWS services to improve their systems at any time.

When it comes to assessing performance aspects like application response time, capacity, scalability, and reliability, Vorwerk trusts StormForge – a Software as a Service (SaaS) for automated and continuous load and performance testing.

Continuous Performance Testing Using CI/CD Integration

StormForge empowers Vorwerk DevOps teams to work in a self-responsible and agile way. Cross-functional teams get the ability to perform automatic tests using StormForge for all builds and releases – reducing organizational dependencies to a minimum.

With every test teams increase the understanding of their system’s behavior to detect possible bottlenecks and issues early on in their development and release processes. Furthermore, size and capacity of Kubernetes pods and nodes are based on detailed utilization data gathered in many load test experiments.

Teams are enabled to verify their non-functional requirements on their own and create quality gates for their production-ready delivery using StormForge’s SLO verification features. This is an important building block to ensure the high-quality standards that Vorwerk has set itself.

StormForge has become an integral part of Vorwerk’s production readiness strategy. Automated load and performance tests are being performed on a regular basis by integrating them into the development processes and continuous delivery pipelines (CI/CD). All teams are now able to test their releases independently and run experiments to guarantee excellent service for every customer around the world.

High Flexibility for the Benefit of all Parties

The AWS Cloud offers the portfolio required to ensure a flawless Thermomix® and Cookidoo® experience.

StormForge’s SaaS solution empowers Vorwerk DevOps teams to make use of a perfect testing approach that fosters autonomy and independence. The solution also helps with organizational scaling by democratization of performance testing and providing access to every single team member. DevOps teams can run tests at any time, with any level of load against any target system from any region in the world with everything fully managed by StormForge SaaS.

With StormForge, every team member can write performance tests as code (with StormForge’s JavaScript DSL) to further foster an automated DevOps culture. Creating test cases used to take days – now teams start conducting their first tests within minutes. Shift-left testing is something that follows automatically.

Vorwerk benefits from an increase in software quality and at the same time teams gain more confidence in systems they are responsible for. A culture of performance, efficiency, and sustainable resource utilization evolves naturally.

Being able to uphold Vorwerk’s quality standards is something that not only benefits Vorwerk itself, but everyone who uses and loves Thermomix® and Cookidoo®.

Some testimonials, case studies and customer references are historically approved by StormForger GmbH/Germany, which was acquired by StormForge in 2020. Please reach out to us if you have any comments or suggestions on the approved usage of the information: marketing@stormforge.io.