Our ever demanding lifestyle has changed the way the foodservice industry works. Wssel is a restaurant aggregator that provides an app and web platform for customers to place orders online, and get them delivered at the desired location in a specified time frame. This on-demand aggregation model requires real-time customer and data management to send notifications to the concerned parties, accept and process orders at the merchant end, and ensure timely order dispatch.

Wssel needed to scale to meet the increasing demand of their services due to the Covid outbreak, but it wasn’t economically feasible to achieve the projected scale. The company decided to modernize their application by migrating their API to containers and their database to a managed service. This would help to reduce the time for maintenance and automate the repetitive tasks. Therefore, the company chose Zero&One - a trusted AWS partner in the MENA region, to help them migrate to AWS.

The Challenge

Wssel started with the co-hosting model, where the digital native application was hosted on their server, but maintained by a third party. The company reached their hosting limit and needed more racks to cope with their expansion strategy. Scaling business operations on the non-premise co-hosting model was an expensive affair and it wasn’t technologically evolved to handle the ever-growing customer base of Wssel.

Why AWS

Wssel’s business model is of an aggregator where it manages partner restaurants, a fleet of delivery agents, and food-loving customers. AWS offers a mix-bag of highly customizable plug and play models to help businesses shift their workloads on a cloud. The lift and shift migration model, combined with the future scalability forecast offers robust solutions that meet the current and future demands without much change in the DevOps architecture.

This future proof architecture enabled the business to save time to market and extra costs while reducing the maintenance load from the client, which puts the client in a growth trajectory rather than managing the nitty-gritty.

Why Zero&One

Zero&One is a customer-obsessed, fully AWS certified partner that keeps the customer's business model as the focal point of development and deployment plan. Their experts enable a smooth transition of business without any downtime, thus zero impact on operations during the transition.

The Solution

The team of AWS experts at Zero & One, dove deep to understand the current tech stack and architecture of Wssel. The focus was to understand their current market standing, technologies they were using, the scale they wanted to achieve and how they were managing it all before consulting Zero&One. The approach that was finally chosen was that Wssel should have an outside-in approach that will enable them to narrow the bridges between restaurants, delivery fleet and customers. They were all brought in on a partner network model to enhance production efficiency.

Zero&One suggested to modernize Wssel platform by migrating to managed services like RDS for their MySQL Database; Elasticache Redis and Memcached for their cache layer; and ECS/ECR for their APIs. Zero&One also suggested S3 as the main Wssel storage for their static content like images, reports and invoices.

Taking a customer-centric approach, Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service) was used to allow smooth communication between different applications used by multiple partners (customers, restaurant, delivery fleet). This fully managed queuing service decouples the sending and receiving components.

Wssel decided to keep their admin, partner, BI and MongoDB servers in VMs and migrate them as is to AWS. Zero&One used CloudEndure to seamlessly migrate these servers.

Wssel was given the authority to design the workflow as per their exact design and cultural sensibilities. AWS uses the simulation software to put things in CloudFormation templates- a simple drag and drop approach also called Digital Native Applications. This gives the developers the authority to develop and enhance the software using a bottom-up approach. Using AWS, costs reduced significantly allowing the business to focus on the operations and taking a load off of maintenance. The solution offered was scalable, and used a future proof architecture to enhance security, reliability and enhanced performance.

Results and Benefits

Sticking to Digital Native Applications was the best thing that happened to Wssel. They designed their own workflows which led the teams to stay operational throughout, and no extra cost was incurred on training purposes, nor was there too much hand-holding that happened. The future proof architecture that comes with digital native applications left ample playgrounds for Wssel to consume cloud services as and when they need in future.

The level of scale they achieved helped in saving costs. The Total Cost of Ownership Analysis showed significant cost savings by 39% compared to the own server buying and cohosting total cost. AWS migration didn’t just save costs for Wssel but also modernized the existing apps and maximised the value of the existing systems. A significant number of manhours were saved by freeing up people from managing servers manually, and moved to focus on the core of the businessensuring smooth customer-centric operations. EC2 instances working with SQS saved time for repetitive administrative tasks.

With the later cloud adoption, future proof architecture and scalability, Wssel is now ready to expand and work according to the global needs of the industry.