TUI Nordic accelerates developer and editor productivity with a new architecture

Introduction

TUI Nordic is a part of the world’s largest travel company. To keep content up-to-date across country-specific websites, TUI Nordic deploys content dozens of times per day, from small tasks like copy edits or adding an extension, to shipping a new page. This was part of a broader initiative to transition from a monolithic platform based on a handful of large solutions, to a more agile architecture consisting of 160+ microservices.

The company’s web portfolio was originally built on traditional enterprise CMS platforms. However, some of these systems were not easy to work with and required massive amounts of time in order to set up each new page or develop new functionality. Contentful (which is powered by AWS) fit right into TUI Nordic’s new microservice architecture, enabling them to have one interface for their editors to configure the overarching content structure, and to centralize the editorial data storage. Also, Contentful’s UI Extensions SDK provided an elegant solution to augmenting the web app to support specific editorial workflows, without having to overload it with the fragile customizations associated with traditional CMS platforms.

And, at the same time, the new architecture allows individual teams to choose the technology best suited to solve each business need. Because Contentful allows the clean decoupling of data and technology used, it supports a rapid development pace — now, new customer touchpoints can be produced an order of magnitude faster.

In a short time, TUI Nordic saw an impressive gain in developer and content editor team productivity. They are no longer bound by technology, and retain full control of their data. Speed is at the core of every initiative: faster time to market, quickly adapting to change, and keeping up with customer needs.