Floward is an online flowers and gifting company founded in 2017 in Kuwait. It partners with flowers growers, farmers, and international brands to offer a wide range of flowers and gifts (Chocolates, perfumes, cakes, …). It is currently operating in 36 cities in 9 countries across the MENA region and London, UK. It guarantees same-day delivery across the board through our own refrigerated fleet. Floward aims to create a seamless experience for customers and make sending flowers and gifts as enjoyable as receiving them.

Customer Challenge:

Floward was facing operational inefficiencies as they were manually scaling their Kubernetes clusters and pods. This caused issues as they faced some downtime when deploying new releases and had fail back process in the case of facing deployment bugs or issues. To magnify the issue further, they did not have any automated process to deploy changes or modifications to their application. This caused immense issues when a problem with the code or feature was identified.

In addition to the application bottlenecks, there were also database performance roadblocks due to their usage of a standalone relational database, which was already causing minor setbacks when activity increased. Lastly, minimal security services were enabled to detect vulnerabilities or malicious activities, which increased the risks of data loss or service disruption.

The Solution:

Zero&One team proposed Amazon EKS as the main solution for their application and Amazon Aurora as the primary database.

Amazon EKS is a managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes in the AWS cloud. Amazon EKS automatically manages the availability and scalability of the Kubernetes control plane nodes responsible for scheduling containers, managing application availability, storing cluster data, and other key tasks. With Amazon EKS, they were able to take advantage of all the performance, scale, reliability, and availability of AWS infrastructure, as well as integrations with AWS networking and security services.

The solution allowed the Floward team to auto-scale their cluster and pods, automate deployment with no downtime and secure workloads at every layer. The following diagram illustrates the new setup based on best practices:

CI/CD using Flux To automate the deployment of new releases, Zero&One suggested to use Flux v2. This tool would allow Floward developers to release fixes and updates automatically on their front-end and back-end services, with the possibility to quickly roll back to older releases if needed.

Managed Services:

Zero&One strives at becoming an extension of the IT team at their customers. In doing so, we not only concentrated on the traditional Managed Services offerings but also provide an opportunity for knowledge dissemination to our customers. During the deployment of the solution, we conducted several upskilling sessions for Floward team to familiarize them with the solution and design an optimal way of working. During this process, we on-boarded the development and production teams onto our Managed Services platform, allowing them to raise tickets 24/7 for any issues that arose during deployments. To assist the client in getting upskilled whilst being provided the operational support, we extended our Managed Services offering to not only provide on-going operational support but also through the deployment of the customer services. Our Managed Services team conducted shadow sessions with teams during the services deployment for them to get upskilled. A technical documentation was also handed over with all the steps and commands used during the implementation of the solutions suggested.

Outcome:

Using the new solution and best practices suggested by Zero&One, Floward has improved the scalability of their workloads, as well as the agility, productivity, and performance of their devops team. In addition, the fully automatic deployment on AWS allowed to avoid hanging or crashing Floward team was facing before using the legacy CI/CD pipelines. Also, security was improved by using secret encryption, properly setting up security groups. Lastly, the new monitoring setup allowed for quicker interventions and issues remediations as notifications are now promptly received by the support team via Slack.