A Major apparel manufacturer engaged TAISTech and Intrgrex to assist with the integration of a new fulfillment system, Radial. Previously the Oracle Web-Commerce platform was directly integrated with the old Fulfillment system. The goal of this project was to swap fulfillment providers in a way that was seamless to the web platform and resulted in no downtime on cutover. It was decided to leverage an integration bus in the middle of Ecommerce and Radial Fulfillment to minimize the integration impact and create a reliable, scalable integration system of the future.
Order Status: from Radial to Ecommerce with Order Status updates.
A primary challenge of swapping TG for Radial was that orders must be able to keep flowing through cutover, and to minimize downtime.
The Entire Project would have to be completed in a tight time frame with a hard cutover in early July, and a short window to fix production bugs before code freeze in Q3 (due to holiday order rush).
Development to completely re-engineer the integration on ATG was deemed too intensive and not possible in the short time period, especially given a parallel launch of a loyalty points project that was taking a substantial commitment by the ATG development team. ATG’s XML APIs must be kept as-is, and would be completely incompatible with the new Radial system of data exchange.
The Manufacturer had little skilled resources or bandwidth to develop an integration on their own.
Dev-ops is not a strength of the manufacturer, and their data center is mostly outsourced much like their ATG hosting solution. A solution that required on premise installations would put the project at risk due to installation timelines.
Orders coming from ATG and going to fulfillment must be reliably transmitted, with good performance even during peak times.
Mulesoft Cloudhub was ultimately decided upon for the reasons of reliability and ability to execute in tight time frame.
Solving for the tight time frame and inexperience of the TAISTech team, TAISTech contracted Intrgrex and Jameson Triplett Wildwood as an experienced Mulesoft Architect and Developer. Jameson had years of experience developing reliable messaging systems and met with the manufacturer directly to gather requirements and build out the initial solutions blueprint. He led the development and testing team from solution architecture to development through QA and Go-Live on Schedule and budget.
The Implementation of the Order System used a reliable messaging pattern developed and tested at multiple clients through Jameson’s experience in Mulesoft. It is Reliable, Redundant, and Re-playable. Messages are received into queues, stored in a database for auditability and visibility, and transformed into sending queues to Radial.
Even in cases of catastrophic systems failure, there are multiple ways that orders (which represent business life-blood) can be retried, replayed, retrieved, and etc. Queues serve to decouple major processing steps in cases of failures during processing. The database provides a query-able source of order information and payload audit. Radial could be down for a significant outage and orders would start flowing as soon as it was receiving again without loss in orders in the interim.
The implementation with Cloudhub and Mulesoft performed without defects through the heavy holiday shopping season. The CIO of the company asked TAISTech and Jameson by name back for more implementations using Mulesoft.
The solution consisted of three Integration Applications: Order_Create, Order_Status, Inventory_ATP.
At a High Level Order_Create integration takes a POST from ATG in the legacy format, and converts it into the Radial Order_In format. Monitors Radial for Order Status and then sends messaged to ATG and other areas within rue21 when the order is completed or hits some other status. An architecture was selected to emphasize reliability and visibility of the messaging. A database was used to record the Orders passing through the application and their subsequent transmission and reply status.
At a high level Order Status reads an FTP based order Status feed from Radial SFTP server and splits and transforms the order status to send to multiple receivers. Msgdb here was implemented to record the Order Status files received to establish visibility to the Integration working as intended.
At a high level the Inventory ATP integration takes the Inventory Delta and Full files from Radial and parses and transmits them to ATG so that ATG has an up to date Inventory of items for sale. Msgdb, similar to Order Status, is implemented to monitor the ongoing transmission of inventory files.
Inside Cloudhub, to accomplish the plumbing required to connect to all the systems we had to implement a VPC with 3 IPSec tunnels, one to rue21 data center, and 2 to Spark::Red for their dev and prod VPCs.
The design with a database containing message metadata will serve to add metrics, and accountability to the deployment. The database provides a first stop to see the system working as intended, see the status of message as they are passing through, and account for discrepancies in reported numbers. Simple queries will allow users and support to see data like: “How many orders were confirmed yesterday?” “How many orders failed?” “Can we compare order numbers on ATG, to Mulesoft, to Radial?” All of these metrics are extremely valuable to the business and IT support.
Cloudhub was chosen to provide a supported Platform (iPaaS) on which to deploy Mulesoft services. It allows rue21 and supporting staff to be concerned only with implementation not with DevOps. Cloudhub also provides easy upgrade paths, where each application can be easily upgraded Mule versions and tested individually.
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