Customer Stories / Transportation & Logistics

2023
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PostNL Handles Logistics for Millions of Parcels with Event-Driven Architecture on AWS

PostNL built event-driven architecture on AWS to manage millions of daily logistics events, boosting efficiency, scalability, and cost efficiency.

1.1 million

parcels delivered daily

200 million

events processed per month

Improved

operational efficiency

Scales to 320

events per second to handle peak volumes

Industry Challenge

Logistics companies generate millions of near-real-time events per day, from transporting parcels from different distribution centers to making deliveries and collecting signatures. Effectively managing these events can be challenging due to their volume and complexity. Seamless communication is crucial to provide customers with the best possible experience.

PostNL's Solution

PostNL built its own logistics software using serverless technology from Amazon Web Services (AWS). “We chose AWS serverless solutions because they’re an excellent match for our logistics business,” says Luc van Donkersgoed, lead engineer at PostNL. “Logistics is a seasonal business in a daily, weekly, and yearly sense. AWS matches that seasonality because it elastically scales with the business demand.”

The logistics supplier uses an event-driven architecture to integrate its numerous serverless applications. The core services of PostNL’s central integration solution are AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), a fully managed message queuing service, and Amazon EventBridge, a serverless event bus.

The event-driven architecture is a centralized integration service that can be used by different teams across PostNL. “This solution lets producers of events send their data to a central location, and it lets consumers of those events subscribe to that data on the same system,” says van Donkersgoed.

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By embracing the services that AWS has to offer, we've been able to increase innovation and reduce time to market.”

Luc van Donkersgoed
Lead Engineer, PostNL

Benefits of Using AWS

In a high-volume distributed landscape, it can be difficult to manage, maintain, and govern direct integrations between applications. With its central integration solution, PostNL can facilitate seamless communication between applications without the overhead associated with multiple direct integrations.

The integration service automatically scales to high volumes and requires no operational maintenance, further saving costs and effort for PostNL. “Using AWS serverless technology, we can build a very cost-efficient integration solution,” says van Donkersgoed. “We process 200 million events per month, but the operational cost remains very low.”

With this seamless scalability, PostNL can quickly add new consumers and subscriptions to its landscape. “One major benefit that we’ve seen from using a central integration solution is that it lets new consumers subscribe to existing events,” says van Donkersgoed. “And that lets our landscape dynamically grow and unlock new business cases that we haven’t even thought of before.”

PostNL’s central integration service has become an essential element of its operations. Presently, the company handles approximately 10 million events per day, with a peak capacity of up to 320 events per second and counting.

By effectively managing and scaling its integration capabilities, PostNL can rapidly deliver innovative solutions and effortlessly adapt to meet the evolving demands of its customers. This empowers PostNL to stay ahead of the curve and provide a seamless experience to its clientele.

“AWS provides the building blocks for us to create exactly the solution that we need,” says van Donkersgoed. “By embracing the services that AWS has to offer, we’ve been able to increase innovation and reduce time to market, helping us be our customers’ favorite deliverer.”
 

About PostNL

PostNL is one of the largest logistics suppliers in the Netherlands. It processes over 1.1 million parcels per day and employs over 35,000 people.

AWS Services Used

Amazon EventBridge

Amazon EventBridge is a serverless service that enables developers to create scalable event-driven applications by routing events between your own applications, third-party software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, and AWS services.

Learn more »

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers.

Learn more »

Amazon SQS

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) lets you send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available.

Learn more »

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