Pons

PONS Langenscheidt GmbH is an established German publishing house founded in 1978 in Stuttgart, Germany. It is a publisher of printed traditional dictionaries, word and text Machine Translation, and books and cross-channel materials devoted to language learning. Under the international PONS and Langenscheidt brands, we offer about 900 products for learning over 40 languages.

Key Challenges

The main challenge was to merge decentralised databases across a complex, multi-product portfolio. Due to the nature and multiplicity of PONS products, this was a complex process requiring the utmost attention to detail. Throughout the entire process, the most important thing was to keep operations running smoothly and ensure continuous availability of services.

Merging decentralised databases
PONS operated multiple databases spread across a large portfolio of language learning products. Consolidating them required careful orchestration to avoid data loss or service disruption across any of the 900+ products.
Infrastructure review and planning
After reviewing PONS's Google Cloud Platform-based infrastructure and entire technology stack, the TR42 team prepared a complete implementation plan along with a detailed breakdown of costs and time required.
Ensuring continuous service availability
Throughout the migration, uninterrupted availability of all services was non-negotiable. The TR42 team executed the transition with zero downtime, maintaining platform stability at every stage of the consolidation.

Features realised

GKE-based container orchestration

Migrated workloads to Google Kubernetes Engine with Helm-managed deployments, Cert-manager for TLS, and Nginx-ingress for traffic routing — providing a production-grade, maintainable platform.

Database consolidation on Cloud SQL

Consolidated decentralised databases onto Cloud SQL with HAProxy for connection pooling and Redis for caching, eliminating the complexity of managing disparate data stores across product lines.

Infrastructure-as-code with Terraform

All GCP resources provisioned and managed via Terraform, giving PONS a fully auditable, reproducible infrastructure that can be extended safely as the product portfolio grows.

24/7 monitoring and ongoing maintenance

Post-migration, TR42 established a 24/7 infrastructure monitoring service and took ownership of ongoing maintenance and further development — the engagement extended into a long-term partnership.