Hungry Hungry Digital Platform

CASE STUDY

A digital and food ordering platform scales to meet growth and performance requirements.

HungryHungry leverages AWS to perform tactical platform remediation – and achieve optimum performance, security & scalability.

Overview

Operating in a fast-growing and highly competitive market, HungryHungry wanted to improve their cloud architecture and performance. To resolve their business challenges and achieve their desired performance outcomes, they partnered with Mantalus to develop an AWS solution.

Background

HungryHungry is a digital menu and ordering platform that unlocks the evolving dining experience for restaurant customers. It informs restaurants what their diners want next, providing instant, discreet guest feedback that allows restaurants to stay ahead of new menu creation, staff training, and customer demands.

The platform leverages real-time insights on customers' behaviour, when they’re ordering, what they’re ordering, and where they come from. It also enables the creation of stunning digital menus and upsell options as well as take instant online payments and pre-ordering.

Challenge

HungryHungry were facing performance issues with their existing Drupal architecture that was being exacerbated by several factors.

  • They had a single App server in Production with Drupal and MariaDB running on the same server.
  • They’d reached the allowed limit on an AWS Marketplace product.
  • They lacked performance visibility on the database side and could not pinpoint causes of problems or performance bottlenecks.
  • All infrastructure and applications were manually configured.

Solution

Before developing and implementing any solutions, Mantalus undertook comprehensive discovery of the Database and Application setup. As Production Application was affected quite severely in peak hours, it was paramount to buy some time for a proper design implementation.

Building a strong understanding and foundation before selecting a solution is a standard approach for all Mantalus projects, ensuring that the outcome is right the first time to achieve cloud perfection. This stage was undertaken alongside and in collaboration with the HungryHungry team, to ensure clarity across both teams.

HungryHungry was keen to utilise AWS Certificate Manager to manage their client certificates and implement auto renewals. Due to this requirement, it was agreed the best solution entailed a CDN in front of the Origin. This would enable HungryHungry to migrate their clients that use externally managed Hosted Zones, to HungryHungry’s generic hosted zone.

Key Solution Elements

Mantalus’ custom AWS infrastructure solution

Cloudfront Distribution

with AWS WAF

Application Load Balancer

with AWS WAF

AutoScaling Group

with Memcached Cluster, RDS and EFS

Outcomes

An ECS Cluster (utilising capacity providers + EFS for Fargate containers as persistent storage) was also used to migrate HungryHungry’s cronjobs from the single App server to per-environment containers.

Extensive testing delivers positive results

HungryHungry performed load tests with up to 100K orders to test this new solution – with positive outcomes.

Since partnering, Mantalus’ implementation has enabled HungryHungry to:

  • Remediate performance bottlenecks
  • Provide their development team with infrastructure as a code via CloudFormation and automation
  • Path a way for cloud uplift according to industry’s best practices

Why Mantalus?

Mantalus’ capability is built on being the tip of the spear to solve difficult and unique problems with AWS technology. Our strength is based on having consultants with an array of industry experience, who have themselves faced a litany of complex, business-critical, technology roadblocks and found creative and class-leading ways to solve them.

We’re great at developing AWS centric architectures, where none have existed before. Think platforms or middleware that have never been attempted on AWS by anyone; or even completely AWS native solutions, removing the need for expensive 3rd party solutions.

So, where can we be useful and important to you? Anywhere there’s pain.

When you’re scratching your heads with a tricky use case that doesn’t fit neatly into a known solution or reference architecture…. think Mantalus. We’re the cure!

AWS has a fantastic array of services – and if you partner with Mantalus we can use them to help you solve just about anything.