Each day, about 2,000 people across greater London depend on the timely delivery of Guardian and Observer newspapers to their doorsteps. And every week, 60,000 people worldwide expect the newspapers to arrive on time. But for the newspapers’ parent company, Guardian News & Media (GNM), making sure those papers arrived on time had become more challenging as the number of subscribers grew. That’s because the GNM development team relied on disparate distributed systems to store customer data. “Orchestrating the data flow between our primary database system and all the third-party systems we use was very difficult,” says Paul Brown, senior developer manager at Guardian News and Media. “If one system was down, that impacted all the other systems. Those reliability issues meant new customers were sometimes not getting their papers because they weren’t showing up in our database.”

GNM also sometimes struggled to fulfill some new online and print subscriptions. “Because some system integrations were unreliable, we occasionally had no way of seeing how many customers made it all the way through the online ‘new subscriber’ checkout workflow,” Brown says. “Some customers who saw errors while checking out weren’t being notified they actually had active subscriptions.” Because GNM did not want to write more code to orchestrate workflows between so many distributed systems, it sought a new, efficient orchestration tool to automate the entire process.