Challenge

igotbills needed a reliable integration with the Austrian Company Register (Firmenbuch) provided by the BMJ (Federal Ministry of Justice) to enable automated company verification. During implementation, however, we found that the BMJ Firmenbuch API was occasionally unreachable, and search requests—whether by company name or Firmenbuchnummer—often took several seconds to complete. This resulted in slow and inconsistent user experience.

Solution

To address this, we implemented a Dragonfly-based response cache that stores API results for configurable periods. The architecture consists of four services:

– a Dragonfly cache service offering Redis-compatible caching with automatic reconnection
– a company search service for name-based queries
– a company details service for Firmenbuchnummer lookups
– a logging service to track address changes over time

The cache is designed to degrade gracefully, ensuring the overall system remains fully operational even when the cache is temporarily unavailable.

Impact

Search performance improved significantly: instead of multiple seconds, around 99% of all requests now complete in just a few milliseconds. Additionally, the caching layer improves resilience against BMJ API outages, providing a stable and consistent user experience regardless of the upstream service's availability.