Digital Experience Layer (Vodafone Greece)

Problem

Vodafone Greece’s digital channels needed responsive, REST-friendly experiences while Core Systems remained business-critical and were not designed for modern web and mobile traffic patterns. DXL was created as a Kubernetes-based middleware layer between those systems and customer-facing clients.

What we built

DXL combines an API layer with a digital datastore. The architecture uses CQRS: changes from enterprise backends stream through Kafka, dedicated services process those changes, and MongoDB holds the resulting read model. This lets digital journeys read current data without placing every request directly on backend systems.

The 2023 Vodafone engineering article describes DXL as a middleware and caching layer, including the CQRS/MongoDB approach and the implementation’s use of Quarkus, Kafka, MongoDB, and an API gateway.

Operating at scale

That 2023 account reports a 170-microservice DXL cluster supported by 16 development teams. It is a publication-specific snapshot, not a combined count with later platform figures. The article also reports an example in which a critical API path fell from 15 seconds to 150 milliseconds, while reducing calls to backend APIs by an order of magnitude.

Outcomes

DXL helped digital channels serve complex customer journeys with a read model designed for their access patterns, reducing load on enterprise backends and giving teams a common Kubernetes-based delivery foundation. The Quarkus migration work later documented faster application start-up and lower resource consumption in separate publications.

My contribution

As Backend Chapter Lead, I led architecture and the development practice behind the platform: building the team, shaping the microservice and shared-library approach, and guiding the move toward reactive, Kubernetes-native Java services. I shared the migration and platform lessons with the Java and cloud-native community.

Media & further reading

Battle of the Frameworks: Quarkus vs Spring Boot

Watch Battle of the Frameworks on YouTube

Quarkus Insights #33

Watch Quarkus Insights #33 on YouTube

Vodafone Greece’s migration journey from Spring Boot to Quarkus

Watch the Red Hat fireside chat on YouTube

The resource cards below provide the source article, talks, interview, and Quarkus post.