Background
Die ZEIT is one of Germany's leading publishing houses. Its digital subscription platform is a central sales channel for the group's journalism, from the weekly newspaper to podcasts and topic verticals, and a large share of all subscriptions runs through it.
The system had worked reliably for years. But it had grown organically: heavily customised, and documented only in parts. When the incumbent service provider became unstable, that history turned into a risk. Contact people disappeared, communication broke down, technical issues went unanswered. Access to the source code was contractually restricted. Hosting was tightly coupled to AWS in a way that was neither cost-efficient nor transparent.
An outage would have had immediate financial consequences. Die ZEIT needed control of its platform back, fast, and without interrupting live operations.
Solution
byte5 came in when the situation was already critical, and migrated the complete system within a few weeks, including every custom solution and a full hosting change.
The first step was reading the entire source code. Different technology standards sat side by side, and a lot of the business logic existed nowhere except in the code itself. So byte5 ruled out a single cut-over. Business-critical functions were prioritized and moved first, less central features were stabilized, and the whole migration ran under continuous observation. The subscription business kept running throughout.
The ordering system was the biggest challenge. It was deeply entangled with AWS services, so byte5 rebuilt it from the ground up, decoupled it from those dependencies and moved it into Die ZEIT's own Microsoft Azure environment on a maintainable basis.
Along the way byte5 flagged and fixed weak points instead of reproducing the status quo. The platform came out of the migration easier to run than it went in.
Impact
Go-live happened on schedule, with minimal follow-up work and no interruption to the subscription business.
Die ZEIT has full control over its own platform again. Source code and hosting sit with the publisher, and consolidating hosting inside the group's existing Microsoft cloud made costs and operations transparent.
The platform is also built to move on. The rebuilt system stays flexible enough for requirements that are not defined yet, and byte5 has already put concrete next steps on the table around A/B testing, performance and UX.
For the team at Die ZEIT, the way of working counted as much as the technology. byte5 responded fast, and understood from the first conversation how business-critical the situation was.
“byte5 were always reachable, thought strategically with us and acted with full commitment. Exactly what we needed at that moment.”
