PostNL Ditches Servers to Fuel Ecommerce Ambitions

PostNL has cut costs by 80 percent and slashed delivery times from months to minutes for its ecommerce API services running on AWS. PostNL is the major mail carrier in the Netherlands and has logistics operations acrossEurope. It uses AWS Lambda as the core of its serverless data-management platform.

The mail industry is in transition. People are sending fewer letters but ordering more parcels, and where there is change, there is opportunity. PostNL—the national mail service of theNetherlands with a 220-year history—wants to position itself at the core of European ecommerce. It created a subsidiary, called Data Solutions, to capitalize on its vast datasets,making data available to paying ecommerce companies via APIs in three categories: address verification, trust, and marketing.

Ahead of the busy 2019 Christmas period, PostNL was concerned that the large data-management application fueling its API platform would be a bottleneck as ecommerce activity increased. The application ran on a single Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, and scaling to cope with peak traffic was complex and expensive.

The existing solution was also inflexible. Bringing new features to market could take months because there were several partners involved in managing various components of the platform. “It was taking too long to get new, revenue-generating features to market, and we couldn’t be as competitive as we wanted,” says Eric van Duin, director of data and IT at Data Solutions.

Van Duin consulted his Amazon Web Services (AWS) team to understand how serverless computing—using services like AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB—could provide the elasticity PostNL needed and make it easier to continuously develop and release software. “What made the business case clear was that we stood to save at least 80 percent on the costs of our data-management platform by moving from a fixed instance and getting rid of our old data-management software,” says van Duin.

PostNL immediately felt the benefit of migrating to a serverless infrastructure. Van Duin says, “When one of our customers accidentally made a month’s worth of API calls in a few hours, not only did we scale seamlessly but response times for all clients actually halved because the Lambda functions began pre-warming. Overall we got a return on our investment well within three months.”

The biggest impact for clients is the speed with which PostNL can get new features into production thanks to developer tools like AWS CodePipeline. “Recently a customer requested a change directly to one of our developers and we implemented it within five minutes—not five months like it used to take,” says van Duin. “It’s this level of service that will keep our business going for the next 200 years.”