Bolloré Transport & Logistics creates a new architecture that hosts Microservices thanks to MongoDB

Bolloré Transport & Logistics is a major international transport and logistics operator with 35,000 employees in 109 countries on five continents. A specialist in multimodal transport, the group operates through four business lines: Bolloré Ports, Bolloré Logistics, Bolloré Energy and Bolloré Railways. The company charters transportation all over the world, such as ships, planes, trains and trucks.

Although the company's activities require the exchange of information worldwide, everything was still in the form of silos until the late 2000s. Subsidiaries and departments communicate in their own technical format. The company is starting to digitize its front office and customer relations to ensure a smooth transition. In the late 2000s, a central system was set up in the form of a portal, bringing together data from the various international silos.

For Tristan Catherine, Solutions Architect, and Eric Jaume, Solutions Architect Manager at Bolloré Logistics, “We have therefore established a core model supplemented by 80% software packages and 20% Microservices.” But this architecture doesn't meet all needs, especially when it comes to the specific regulatory requirements of each country, for example. As a result, Microservices are multiplying locally, and software packages are unable to handle special freight cases. Bolloré Transport & Logistics specializes in “specific” transport, unlike its competitors who manage standard processes.

Enterprise Microservices

Faced with this problem, the company has come up with a new concept in the form of virtualization Microservices, known as the "Microservices Enterprise". It's all about virtualizing services and data in industry language. A Microservice consists of an exposure layer in the form of an API, an engine generally developed in the native Cloud, and a “Single Source of Truth” managed via MongoDB. Here, MongoDB Atlas offers unrivaled enterprise data visibility, extracting information from silos into a single, unified view.

In this way, a Microservice becomes the single point of reference (Repository) for a business entity. For example, the quotation microservice for an international shipment within the company is the only source of truth. Customers can obtain information via a web portal, or they can also use the manual quotation service, which remains in place. This digitalization effort prevents the need to eliminate existing services.

A Lakehouse with MongoDB

Over the course of 2024, Bolloré Transport & Logistics will use all its “Entreprise Microservices” as sources of power for a Lakehouse, i.e. a scalable data warehouse for all living information, at a lower cost in terms of storage. In the coming years, the company will be adding a complementary concept, Lakehouse-as-a-Service, thanks to MongoDB.

The general principle of this architecture is that regardless of the customer, in the global universe of Bolloré Transport & Logistics, the customer can make a request via a portal for a new service. This request goes through “Entreprise Microservices” which virtualizes it, standardizes it, and then transmits it to service producers. When this service is created, the customer is alerted to its availability.

The entire MongoDB ecosystem is exploited here: Atlas, horizontal scalability, sharding and TTL (Time-To-Live). Today, there are 2 Enterprises Microservices (EM): the quotation and the order form. Next year, Track and Trace and Courier will be launched. Later, the Customer Preference EM will appear, focusing on CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) constraints, while we await the CO2 EM. This makes it possible to find out how much carbon dioxide a given carrier produces per mile for an aircraft, or whether another carrier offers alternative fuel...

Why MongoDB?

EM requires extremely reliable technologies. For databases, MongoDB has the advantage of eliminating "single points of failure" for accessing data produced by a service.