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.
