At Wide, Talan & Micropole’s digital agency, they help leading brands modernize their digital infrastructures while ensuring scalability, security, and performance. When Audi France approached them to migrate its system to Symfony 6, they embraced the challenge of revamping their architecture while optimizing their technological ecosystem. Through this transformation, they not only enhanced their software stack but also positioned them for future innovations.
The company
Audi is a renowned premium brand in the automotive industry. The French subsidiary of the group stands out with specialized services tailored to the local market, particularly in managing inquiries, test drives, and vehicle maintenance. To ensure a seamless and efficient experience between prospects and dealerships, Audi France provides its network with lead acquisition and management solutions.
Challenges
The system followed a microservices architecture, relying on a dozen APIs and multiple web frontends built and maintained with Symfony 4. For Audi France, it was crucial to keep security updates up to date, maintain dependencies, and integrate the latest technological innovations.
However, the aging infrastructure restricted the upgrade to PHP 8, making the migration to Symfony 5 and beyond impossible. Additionally, the high costs associated with infrastructure migration made a simple update unfeasible. In response to these challenges, Audi France decided to undertake a complete system overhaul by migrating directly to Symfony 6.
Their solution
To ensure a smooth and controlled transition, they executed the migration in multiple phases. First, all deprecated functionalities were updated in their previous Symfony versions to ensure full compatibility with the new version.
Once this step was completed, part of the system was rebuilt using Symfony 6, allowing Audi France to leverage the latest advancements of the framework. For instance, replacing RabbitMQ with Symfony Messenger reduced dependency on external tools, simplified the software architecture, and optimized asynchronous task execution. Additionally, Symfony Messenger’s improved configuration through attributes and batch consumption further enhanced efficiency.
Symfony 6 also provided several key benefits, including:
✔ Improved performance, thanks to features like Doctrine precompilation.
✔ Full support for PHP 8, with attributes replacing annotations for cleaner, more maintainable code.
✔ Enhanced Symfony Messenger capabilities, making asynchronous processing more efficient.
By leveraging these improvements, they ensured a seamless transition while maintaining system integrity.
Results
Thanks to this migration, Audi France successfully modernized its infrastructure while optimizing its operations. By reducing technical dependencies and leveraging the features introduced in Symfony 6, they enabled the brand to:
✔ Improve its time-to-market,
✔ Reduce maintenance costs,
✔ Ensure better system scalability.
With Symfony 6 at its core, Audi France is now positioned to respond more effectively to customer demands — combining agility, reliability, and performance for the road ahead!
"At Audi France, delivering a premium experience to our customers is at the core of our commitment. In partnership with Wide, we embarked on a system modernization journey, migrating to Symfony 6. This transformation not only allows us to ensure optimal security and maintenance but also enables us to meet market expectations in line with our vision of excellence and innovation."
Frédéric ROCHE – Head of Direct Sales & Digital, Audi France
"The system followed a microservices architecture" (...) "However, the aging infrastructure restricted the upgrade to PHP 8"
Does not that contradict itself?
"For instance, replacing RabbitMQ with Symfony Messenger reduced dependency on external tools"
Who writes this stuff?
@Lionel The second one does make sense if they directly used RabbitMQ before. Using the Messenger provides an abstraction layer. This means less coupling to a concrete service, and it’s way easier to switch to a different one.