On March 25, 2011, I photographed my whiteboard at arvato digital services. Across the top were two storefronts, Rockstar Games and 2K, each drawn as a small box marked “ec,” with an arc over both labeled Take Two, the publisher that owns them. A third storefront sat off to the left under a question mark. Below a dashed line were five boxes with the word services written across the top of each one, for the catalog, marketing, checkout, profiles and payments. Payments was fenced off behind its own dashed line, marked PCI. Every box sat on a database.
Three years later to the day, on March 25, 2014, Martin Fowler and James Lewis published “Microservices,” the article engineers still cite when they have to explain what the word means. A footnote dates the term to a workshop of software architects near Venice in May 2011. That was two months after I took the picture.
I had started on January 31 as a senior software architect in arvato’s office in Valencia just after Volusion closed shop in California. Bertelsmann, the German media group, runs its services business under the arvato name out of Gütersloh. The name was coined in 1999 and doesn’t mean anything. My part of it, arvato digital services, had been called Sonopress until 2008. Sonopress was founded in 1958 to press vinyl for Bertelsmann’s record club and grew into one of the largest disc replicators in the world, and the Valencia office sold supply chain, replication and software distribution to publishers. Your old MSDN Disk collection came from there.
My job was the Rockstar Warehouse, Rockstar’s official online store, which arvato was rebuilding. Rockstar wasn’t paying for it. As I remember the deal Jesse Gould closed, arvato built the store for nothing and took 13 percent of sales. That’s how badly arvato wanted the business. The footer of the finished site spelled out the arrangement: “The Rockstar Warehouse is powered by arvato digital services, official reseller of Rockstar Games.”
Since that article came out, a box per business capability with its own database underneath has become the respectable answer to how you build software that scales. I worked on one of those systems three years before Fowler and Lewis defined it. Its product pages wouldn’t load until I cached the entire catalog, and the deal around it was worse than the code.
Nobody Laughed
Most of the meetings were in German. The Yiddish I picked up from my grandmother turns out to be close enough to German to catch a word here and there, and nowhere near close enough to follow a meeting.
In my first few weeks I tried a few jokes. Nobody laughed. I stopped.
The platform came from Germany too. It was overbuilt and over-engineered, German engineering at its worst. There was a module for the catalog, another for sales, another for customers, and two more for marketing and payments. They talked to each other through an API, and each one kept its own database.
Every Box Had Its Own Database
The whiteboard doesn’t show the IDs. A product had an ID in the catalog. A customer had one in profiles. An order in checkout had to point at both, and since checkout couldn’t see into either database, it kept its own copies of the keys. So did marketing, and so did every other module that needed to know what a product or a customer was. The IDs that tied the store together were duplicated across all of them, and no database anywhere could guarantee that an order pointed at a product that still existed, because the order and the product lived in different databases owned by different services.
Rockstar added one more. Shoppers could check out with an existing Social Club account, create a new one during checkout, or buy as a guest, and Social Club was Rockstar’s own system with its own idea of who a customer was. The order confirmation template congratulated new members on registering and listed what membership got them. The store doubled as a signup funnel for Rockstar’s identity system, and the customer ID now lived in one more place.
Fowler and Lewis are candid about that cost. When every service manages its own database, transactions across services get hard, and their answer is transactionless coordination, accepting that consistency may only be eventual, and cleaning up mistakes with compensating operations. That trade makes sense for an organization with dozens of teams that need to ship without waiting on each other. In the April 2011 templates, the related-items rail on the Red Dead Redemption product page offered a Red Dead Redemption dynamite candle for $15.
It was also terribly slow. Every page that showed a product had to ask the catalog module for it over the API and wait, and any page that needed two modules paid for both trips.
Amazon’s own engineers wrote up the same lesson twelve years later. In March 2023 the Prime Video team described moving a video-quality monitoring service from distributed components into a single application, and the infrastructure cost dropped by more than 90 percent. Adrian Cockcroft, a former AWS vice president and microservices’ most vocal champion, told The New Stack that the rebuilt service was still a microservice, and AWS added that it was one of many services Prime Video runs. Both points are fair. It’s still the same disease, paying for the trip between components on every unit of work.
The one call on that whiteboard I’d keep is the dashed line on the right. The PCI Security Standards Council strongly recommends isolating the cardholder data environment from the rest of the network, because done properly it can shrink the scope of the assessment. Putting payments behind their own boundary was exactly right.
I Cached the Entire Catalog
I did what I could with the German code, which mostly meant keeping the storefront from asking it for anything it didn’t have to. I cached the entire catalog. A product page never waited on the catalog module, and that’s what it took to make a page load at all. Everything after that got cached as aggressively as I could get away with, because without it the system wouldn’t have held up at scale.
It worked because the catalog was small enough to cache whole. The menu in the templates ran to games for eight platforms going back to the original PlayStation, a clothing section called Finery, Grand Theft Auto Kubrick box sets, posters and downloads. The price of caching everything is that the store always runs a little behind the system of record, and every feature after that comes with a question about which data is allowed to be stale, and for how long.
The whiteboard keeps coming back with new words in the boxes. In 2026 the boxes say agent. A catalog agent, a checkout agent and a customer agent, each with its own memory and its own copy of the product ID. I build agentic systems for commerce now, including Cara, the shopping assistant on ShopSnap storefronts, and the rule from that catalog still holds. Nothing slow goes between a customer and a page. Language models are slow. MCP wasn’t built for fast, continuous reads, and a plain API with a cache in front of it still beats it there. Put a model in the render path of a product page and you’ve rebuilt the arvato catalog module, plus a token bill.
Lowell Did the Design
I hired Lowell Hausman to do the design. If you read the Web Business Development piece, you’ve met Lowell. He designed usetheexperts.com in 2000 while I wrote the ASP behind it, and he’s been one of my best friends ever since.
The HTML templates were built by a design studio in Germany. The set that came in on April 20, 2011, included an index page linking every template. Each finished section’s heading carried a CSS class called fertig, German for finished, which turned it green. Home and games, product details, checkout, sign-in, my account and the footer pages were all green. One heading was still orange. ErrorPages. Its only entry read “Design fehlt.” Design missing.
Our customers at Rockstar were Angus Wong and Channing Delph in New York. In September 2011, Angus reported a yellow background on the sign-in form at devstore.rockstargames.com/SignIn.aspx. That was Chrome’s autofill color in those days, the pale yellow it painted into any field it had filled in for you. Lowell had already switched autofill off for the form. He tested it in two copies of Chrome, couldn’t reproduce it, and told the team he suspected an add-on on Angus’s machine was overriding the setting.
In February 2012 one of Lowell’s invoices was held up because arvato’s controlling department, which is what German companies call the people who check your math, questioned the items he had billed at a one-hour minimum. It got paid, late, with a note saying it was hard to believe each alignment fix took an hour and asking him to take a diligent look at his next invoice before he submitted it.
A one-hour minimum is ordinary for contract work. The templates from Germany had shipped with two extra stylesheets that existed only to correct Internet Explorer, one for version 8 and one for everything older. The IE8 file is four rules long, and two of them nudge a row of checkboxes and a row of radio buttons up four pixels. Anyone who lined up a layout across Internet Explorer and Chrome in 2011 knows where the hour went.
They Called Me at 2 A.M.
The new Warehouse was live by the middle of October 2011. Fan sites wrote it up on October 14, alongside the merchandise for Grand Theft Auto III’s tenth anniversary, and listed Social Club member login, Game Series collections, a new Digital Downloads section and better package tracking among the changes.
Rockstar is in New York, and they wanted the store live at 5 a.m. their time. That’s 2 a.m. in California. At 2 a.m. they called me, and I was so obviously asleep that they told me never mind and let me go back to bed.
I understand why they wanted a time. Rockstar lives on release dates. A game ships on a street date announced months ahead, and the marketing runs to it. A website hasn’t worked that way in a long time. You point DNS at the new servers and wait for the change to reach everyone, and everyone doesn’t arrive at 5:00.
Ops people will tell you to drop the TTL on the record a day or two ahead, and most resolvers will pick up the new address within minutes. Most. Some hold on to the old answer longer than they were told to, and the customer looking at the old store doesn’t care whose cache it was.
Paid search isn’t any more punctual. You can schedule a campaign to start at 5 a.m., but every ad has to clear review first. Google’s own help page says it reviews most ads within one business day and some take longer, and its advice for an ad that has to run by a particular date is to submit it several days early.
Everything worked anyway. Rockstar let Lowell and me pick two collectibles each, and we both went straight for the most expensive thing in the store, a Max Payne doll at $800. I’ve moved so many times since 2011 that I lost mine.
The Deal Was Worse Than the Code
It turned out Rockstar sent the download buyers to Steam and used the Warehouse mainly to sell the toys. That shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Rockstar had put its entire PC catalog on Steam in January 2008, three years before the whiteboard. The April templates still had a block on the order confirmation page for download keys, with a Grand Theft Auto IV key for Windows in the sample order. By launch, the Digital Downloads section was what the fan coverage called a compendium of links. That left the 13 percent riding mostly on T-shirts, posters and collectibles.
The platform needed four servers to carry the traffic. Four servers doesn’t sound like much until you remember who was paying for them. The hardware, the engineering in Germany, the templates, Lowell’s hours and my salary all came out of arvato’s pocket, against a percentage of T-shirts and toys. That also explains why controlling read Lowell’s invoices one alignment fix at a time. I’d bet arvato lost money on the deal.
From where I sat, arvato got outplayed. It wanted the name, and Rockstar knew exactly what the name was worth.
Every services company wants a famous logo on its client page, and every famous company knows it. Before you build something for free to get one, ask how the company behind the logo got so rich. It wasn’t by losing negotiations.
About the Author
Gal Ratner has spent nearly thirty years building and shipping production software on the Microsoft and .NET stack, for clients including Microsoft, Sony, Rockstar Games, 2K Games, Best Buy, and Allegiant Air. In 2011 he was the senior software architect on the Rockstar Warehouse relaunch at arvato digital services. He built the store provisioning systems at Volusion, was the sixth employee at Break.com, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Business Journal’s CTO of the Year.
He is Chief Architect at Prana Entertainment, a Las Vegas enterprise software and AI consultancy, and the founder and CTO of Inverted Software and WhiteStar Labs. He runs ShopSnap, a zero-transaction-fee commerce platform, and built Cara, its agentic shopping assistant. His current work is agentic AI in production, including MCP servers, the Microsoft Agent Framework, SQL Server 2025 vector search, and PLogger, his open-source observability framework. He is also the author of the novel The Archive of Lost Suns.
galratner.com · linkedin.com/in/galratner · blog.galratner.com
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