Infrastructure Optimization for Online Meal Planning platform
The customer is a Sweden-based online recipe-sharing platform combined with online grocery and delivery services. They help people eat healthier meals and live happier lives by creating personalized dietary programs, adding recipes to them and delivering the required ingredients to the customer’s doors. The customer wanted us to help optimize the back-end performance, enable monitoring, backup&recovery and help develop new features.
Case info
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Industry: Meal planning, online grocery and delivery
Partnership period: May 2019 – ongoing
Team size: 1 Team Lead, 2 DevOps engineers
Team location: Kharkiv, Ukraine
Services: AWS infrastructure performance optimization, monitoring implementation, CI/CD
Expertise delivered: AWS Cloud infrastructure management and optimization, monitoring and alerting implementation, CI/CD configuration
Technology stack: AWS, Kafka, GitHub, Docker, RDS Aurora (MySQL), Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Lambda, EC2, ECS, ELB, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeCommit, AWS auto-scaling groups, CloudWatch, SNS, S3, Github, Varnish, DataDog
Project requirements
The customer wanted IT Svit to deliver various DevOps services:
- Assess the existing AWS infrastructure
- Design and implement the failover plan
- Restructure the current DB setup
- Finish the CI/CD configuration
- Optimize the system performance
- Increase the cost-efficiency of operations
- Provide detailed developer documentation
- Provide ongoing system support and updates
Challenges and solutions
The infrastructure the customer operates is split into two regions, in Germany and in the US. Both have the test and production environments and run several apps that enable platform functionality. As the product is very popular in Sweden, it is in constant development, so the customer needed us to configure a failsafe CI/CD pipeline for developing and releasing platform updates using AWS resources and services. We also went with optimizing the system performance and reducing the amount of AWS services and resources used.
One of the goals of the project was to move the workloads from Germany to the US to increase the response time.
We assessed the existing infrastructure and configured AWS VPC peering to optimize resource allocation. We also moved the production environment to the US and created an Aurora RDS slave replica in the US region. Then we configured AWS CI/CD tools to update both the US and Germany regions simultaneously and replicated the monitoring system from Europe to the US region. We also updated the Varnish deployment to change the endpoint based on the region.
Then we prepared detailed developer documentation and are currently providing ongoing project support.
Results
By properly configuring AWS services and restructuring the system, we helped the customer reduce the expenses on infrastructure maintenance, shorten time-to-market for the platform updates and new features and increase overall cost-efficiency of the operations.
Conclusions
IT Svit has proven its in-depth expertise with AWS products and services once more. We helped the leading Swedish meal planning and online grocery platform become more cost-efficient, deliver uninterrupted positive end-user experience and drive more value to their customers.