Benjamin Lemin
FR EN

Client project · SSO · Microservices

Rossel — MoveIT (SSO Platform)

Contribution to the design and development of a scalable unified authentication platform for the Rossel media ecosystem.

Associated experience

Contraste Digital

Backend PHP Developer / Consultant · 2019 — 2025

View related experience

Context

Rossel is one of the largest media groups in Belgium, operating multiple newspapers and digital media platforms, including Le Soir.

The MoveIT project aimed at redesigning the user management and authentication system across the Rossel ecosystem.

The objective was to build a new scalable Single Sign-On platform capable of supporting all Rossel media brands.

The new system was designed to progressively replace existing authentication mechanisms, starting with Le Soir and later expanding to other newspapers of the group.

Project objectives

The project adopted a microservices architecture to ensure long-term scalability and modularity.

My contributions

Microservices development

I participated in the development of backend services using Go and the Gin framework.

I implemented two microservices responsible for user-related functionalities within the new authentication system.

I adopted structured request handling using DTO, Data Transfer Object, patterns to ensure clear separation between API contracts and internal business logic.

Event-driven communication

I contributed to the design and implementation of Kafka message structures used for communication between services.

The architecture combined REST APIs for synchronous interactions and Kafka event queues for asynchronous communication.

User registration system

I contributed to the development of services supporting the new user registration workflow used by Rossel websites.

These services were consumed by the front-end applications implementing the new user onboarding funnel.

Observability and logging

I worked with the ELK stack, Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana, to monitor and analyze logs generated by the microservices architecture.

This setup allowed centralized log collection and improved debugging across the distributed system.

Architecture

The system relied on a containerized microservices architecture.

Services were deployed on Azure infrastructure using Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines.

Backend

  • Backend services developed in Go
  • Gin framework
  • DTO patterns for structured data exchange

Communication

  • REST APIs for synchronous interactions
  • Kafka for event-driven communication
  • Event queues for asynchronous exchanges

Infrastructure

  • Docker containers
  • Azure
  • Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines

Observability

  • ELK Stack
  • Elasticsearch
  • Logstash
  • Kibana
  • Centralized log aggregation

Team

The project involved a large multi-team organization including an infrastructure / DevOps team, several backend teams responsible for different service domains and a frontend team responsible for the user registration experience.

I worked within two Scrum teams: the user registration team, composed of around six to seven members, and the microservices backend team, composed of around five to six developers.

Technical challenges

The project required designing and implementing a highly scalable authentication system capable of supporting multiple media brands.

Outcomes / impact

The project contributed to the implementation of a new unified authentication platform designed to progressively replace existing systems in the Rossel ecosystem.

The developed microservices and communication mechanisms contributed to building a scalable technical foundation for user management across multiple media brands.

What this mission brought me

This mission allowed me to work on a large-scale microservices architecture, with strong challenges related to scalability, inter-service communication and user management.

It strengthened my understanding of distributed systems, event-driven architectures and the challenges of operating high-volume production services.