At Michelin we know how to make tyres that is for sure. Do you know the Michelin Guide for restaurants? That's us too. But guess what? we also do some IT.

We would like to tell you a story of a project that started in Clermont-Ferrand right in the center of France during the first COVID lock down. Not the best conditions to start, right?
This project was all about replacing a huge and complex Business Process Management tool, an orchestrator of our internal logistic flows. And when we say huge, we really mean it: more than 24 processes, 150 millions of tyres moved representing 10 billions € of Michelin turnover. So why replacing such a critical component in our Information System? Mainly because it was built like a monolithic ERP and became difficult to maintain, not to say a potential single point of failure. We decided to replace it with a choreography of micro-services around our Kafka cluster.

And to make things easier, we had to deal with a set of constraints: no big bang to replace the existing system too risky and no iterations either as our testing costs would have exploded

Through this REX, we want to share with you
* how we decomposed this monolith: from the theory to the reality
* how the Kafka Connect ecosystem helped us to reduce the impact and isolate this monolith to start with
* how Kafka Streams was instrumental to implement this choreography composed of more than 150 micro-services

And bonus: it works in production