Sector(s)
Project Team
- SparkFabrik: Cloud infrastructure design, DevOps, Drupal platform engineering, China regulatory consulting (ICP Filing, PSB registration)
- Caleffi Hydronic Solutions: Digital Marketing and Communication, Caleffi China branch, editorial team
Caleffi Hydronic Solutions makes components for heating, air conditioning, plumbing, and renewable-energy systems for residential and industrial use. It employs over 1,300 people, sells in more than 90 countries, and has been present in China for over 20 years.
Caleffi's corporate site is a multi-country, multi-language platform built on Drupal that serves every market from a single codebase. Reaching Chinese users from servers in Europe, however, was slow and unreliable: a global performance index of just 20 from within China, on a market where many mobile visitors abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load.
SparkFabrik handled the technical, consulting, and operational work, including the Chinese regulatory filings (ICP Filing and Public Security Bureau registration) required to host inside China.
About the project
Goals
- Give the Chinese market a digital experience equivalent to every other country in speed, security, content control, and usability
- Keep serving China from the existing multi-country Drupal platform, not a separate build
- Let Chinese editors update content from within China while headquarters keeps central control
- Move to a multi-cloud, future-proof footing
Challenge
Delivering a Western-quality web experience inside China means overcoming real infrastructural barriers: cross-border latency, content-delivery limits, and mandatory local hosting with its regulatory prerequisites. Content served from Europe scored a performance index of 20 from Chinese territory, slow for visitors, frustrating for local editors. Hosting inside China first required ICP Filing and Public Security Bureau registration. All of this had to happen without fragmenting the single Drupal platform that serves every other market.
Solution
The Chinese instance of the existing Drupal platform was deployed on a China-based cloud (Alibaba Cloud) with a local content-delivery network, while the global instance continued on Google Cloud. Both run the same containerized Drupal application, so the two regions stay in step. Highlights:
- Multi-cloud, single platform: the same Drupal codebase runs on Alibaba Cloud for China and Google Cloud for the rest of the world, with content and configuration managed centrally
- In-region hosting, compliant: ICP Filing was completed in 20 days, followed by Public Security Bureau registration, allowing lawful hosting inside China
- Cloud-native operations: containerized with Docker and orchestrated on Kubernetes, with automated CI/CD delivering updates to every regional instance
- Synchronized releases: features and fixes ship to all regional instances together, so the Chinese site never falls behind the global one
- Editorial autonomy: Chinese editors work in the same Drupal authoring environment, now fast from within China, while Italy keeps platform-wide control
Outcome
- Performance index from within China rose from 20 to 90, a +196% improvement
- High-availability platform with business continuity across both clouds
- Chinese site administrators reported that updating the platform is now a pleasure
Moving the Chinese-language site to Alibaba Cloud brought us closer to the market. It lets wholesalers, installers, architects, and end users access Caleffi technical and commercial information faster and more conveniently.
Dario Shu, Chief Representative Caleffi China
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was already the content backbone of Caleffi's global site, chosen for the main portal over proprietary enterprise CMS and Adobe solutions. For the China initiative the platform did not change; what mattered was that Drupal made a multi-region, multi-cloud deployment possible without forking the product:
- One codebase, many countries: a single multi-country, multi-language Drupal install serves 90+ markets, so China is a regional instance of the same product, not a separate build to maintain
- Deployment portability: standards-based, twelve-factor-friendly architecture let the identical application run on a China-based cloud and on Google Cloud without code divergence
- Features that propagate everywhere: because every region runs the same platform, work done for the global site becomes available to the Chinese site at the same time
- Central control with local autonomy: granular permissions let headquarters in Italy govern the whole platform while Chinese editors manage their own content independently
- Open source, no per-seat licensing: multiple regional deployments scale without license cost, backed by a large community
Technical Specifications
Drupal's standards-based, twelve-factor-friendly architecture let the identical application run as a container across two clouds and regions without forking the codebase. Centralized configuration management keeps the regional instances consistent, while Drupal's multilingual and granular-permission capabilities let one platform serve many countries and still give the Chinese branch editorial autonomy under central governance.
