Case Study
Metaways PaaS fOR Pimcore
STUTTGART
AIRPORT (STR)
The Client
9.6 million passengers, almost a 100k flight movements to 124 destinations served by 39 airlines – these figures from 2025 illustrate the role of Stuttgart Airport as a hub in southwestern Germany. With growth in recent years, responsibility has also increased, leading to the launch of forward-looking sustainability projects such as the “STRzero” climate strategy.
The concept takes a holistic approach to climate protection. It covers the topics of energy efficiency, energy generation, smart grids, mobility, and transportation.
Project decisions are made based on economic, ecological, and social aspects. CO₂ emissions are taken into account and priced internally. In this way, Stuttgart Airport promotes investment in lower-emission technologies and activities.
“Right from the start, we were impressed by the technical sophistication of the requirements and the structured design of the solution. The technical expertise was evident at all times.”
Kevin Cruel
Managing Director
elbkapitäne
Booking
Stuttgart Airport pursued the goal of developing a website that goes far beyond simply providing information: a central, accessible platform that optimally supports travelers, visitors, and business partners. In addition to a clearly structured information architecture and a consistent mobile orientation, a particular focus was placed on seamlessly integrating external systems—including parking information, shop offers, and, above all, live flight data—and presenting them in a user-oriented manner. The aim was to ensure that up-to-date, relevant, and consistently presented content was available at all times.
The agency elbkapitäne was commissioned with the relaunch and tasked with creating a digital customer experience throughout the entire passenger journey.
A key focus for hosting and operation stems from Stuttgart Airport’s sustainability and climate strategy, known as “STRzero.” Added to this are the issues of scaling and security: peak loads due to unforeseeable events must be addressed, as the website is the most important means of communication during special events and, as a public institution, STR is a potential target of attacks, for example DDoS attacks, which must be mitigated effectively.
In such a worst-case scenario, it is important to switch to a reduced, easy-to-edit emergency page that is operated outside the Kubernetes platform in order to maintain the information channel to passengers, affected parties, and visitors. In addition, Metaways’ 24/7 support means that system and cloud engineers familiar with the project are available around the clock on the hosting side to respond quickly in the event of an emergency or malfunction.
“It was advantageous for us that communication between the agency and Metaways was very good and transparent, and we only had to take action when it came to making decisions.”
Thomas Puscher
Senior Expert Digital Marketing & E-Commerce Management
Commercial Non-Aviation / Airport Media
Check-In
The customized infrastructure includes Metaways PaaS for Pimcore with containerized operation of applications in the Microsoft Azure hyperscaler cloud, orchestrated with Kubernetes. The worker nodes in the Kubernetes cluster are distributed across three availability zones, and services (database, caches, search, etc.) are operated by Metaways as a cluster setup directly in Kubernetes. For AZ-distributed operation of the Pimcore containers, Metaways provides the supporting agency with its own namespace with config maps, secrets, and appropriate permissions in the Kubernetes cluster. The respective responsibilities in operation are clearly defined and sharpened by a RACI matrix for the project.
Two Kubernetes clusters are active for quality-assured development and reliable deployments – a productive cluster (PROD) and a cluster for development, testing, and acceptance (NON-PROD). Sustainability aspects were also taken into account in the design: These include resource-saving operation through automatic scaling, reduction of system load through efficient caching and distributed delivery of static and dynamic content, reduction of unwanted data traffic through DDoS protection also at the application level, and targeted mitigation of bots and protection of applications and APIs through a web application firewall. To this end, the airport relies on solutions from Metaways partner Akamai.
On the hardware side, major steps have been taken toward climate protection and energy efficiency, such as through the use of the Azure region “Sweden Central,” whose data centers are powered by 100% CO₂-free energy, and through the use of compute nodes with modern ARM processors, which consume up to 40% less energy than x86 CPUs with comparable performance, depending on the workload.
“While we can focus on the further development and optimization of Pimcore, Metaways reliably provides a secure, stable, and high-performance hosting platform. This is exactly how you imagine platform operation in a partnership.“
Kevin Cruel
Managing Director
elbkapitäne
Boarding
Some course corrections had to be made before the launch. For example, the emergency page process was implemented in stages, partly to avoid jeopardizing the relaunch date. Caching also caused problems for editors and could only be resolved by automatically deleting the cache after new content was published.
A platform of this complexity and relevance for the customer requires not only technical refinements but, above all, effective communication and coordination between stakeholders. During implementation, elbkapitäne and Metaways were particularly called upon to keep the overhead for Stuttgart Airport low and maintain a balance between technical exchange, decision-making, and transparency through good cooperation.
STR was very satisfied that the good cooperation in the implementation project meant that no “settling-in phase” was necessary during operation and that the airport only had to allocate a few of its own IT resources to the project.
Metaways
Infosystems
GmbH
Address
Pickhuben 2
20457 Hamburg
Germany
Telephone
+49 40 31 70 31-0