Consumentenbond

How we helped the Consumentenbond move towards a DevOps way of working

For fair prices and the best quality, consumers in the Netherlands can rely on the Consumentenbond website for anything related to product and service comparisons, legal advice and survey-based consumer initiatives. Since 2019, we’ve worked together with this independent consumer organization, to help them implement a DevOps way of working, cut costs and create the best conditions to optimize and deploy consumer tools.

About our customer

Consumentenbond is a Dutch consumer organization with about 400,000 members. Its mission is to build, together with consumers, well-functioning, safe and fair markets, where consumers can easily find and compare products and services and get legal advice. The organization is a trusted voice for consumers and also provides a platform to bring them together.

The situation

As an independent platform and consumer organization, Consumentbond seeks to protect people from corporate abuse like unsafe products, predatory lending, or false advertising. All of their different software processes, from product comparisons to survey forms and other applications and services, are centralized and integrated with the content management system of the website.

The IT question

To make sure the organization will continue to be the trusted voice for consumers, they asked us to develop a safe and resilient cloud infrastructure for AWS and help transition the organization towards a DevOps way of working. This way, their developers can ​​evolve and improve products at a faster pace than using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.

The business behind the question

In 2019, the Consumentenbond moved to a holacracy model with flexible roles and self-managing teams. Their IT infrastructure, however, was still based on a classical data center setup with on-premise servers. The organization wanted its IT infrastructure to reflect its new organizational structure, as well as a secure, future-proof infrastructure where autonomous dev teams are able to roll out and optimize applications faster.

Our solution

We helped Consumentenbond with moving their applications to AWS using Kubernetes and cloud-native solutions, and building a robust and secure infrastructure, where everything is automated. This way, developers can test and deploy new applications themselves, rather than relying on a third party. We also provided maintenance and support, as well as our technical expertise to help familiarize their IT and development teams with the new cloud environments. We also helped implement a core team, define responsibilities and standardize workflows and feature requests, so that teams did not have to reinvent the wheel every time to deploy a new application.

The mission-critical transformation

With its new platform, the Consumentenbond now has a cloud infrastructure that reflects its flat organizational structure. Development teams can do much more in less time because they no longer have to spend a lot of time troubleshooting or working on fixing server downtime. New applications can be deployed much faster and maintenance costs have been drastically reduced.