Ordering and live rider tracking for 14 London restaurants
A branded ordering app with live rider tracking that took 14 South London restaurants off commission-heavy delivery apps.
+65%online orders
4.8★App Store rating
The client
Northwind Retail sells homeware online to customers across the UK, with a small in-house development team based in Canary Wharf. Around a third of its yearly revenue comes from four big sale weekends.
The challenge
The shop ran on a single dedicated server that was sized for an ordinary Tuesday. On sale days it slowed to a crawl, and twice it fell over completely. Deploys were manual and took the site offline for an evening, so the team shipped less often than it wanted to. The hosting contract was also expensive for what it provided.
What we built
Deploys without the evening off
Every merge now builds, tests and releases automatically. New versions go live behind a health check, and if anything fails the previous version is back in place within a minute.
- The platform packaged in Docker containers, running on AWS eu-west-2 with auto-scaling for sale days.
- All infrastructure written in Terraform, so every environment is reviewed and repeatable.
- Managed PostgreSQL with point-in-time backups, and Redis for sessions and caching.
- Dashboards and alerts for traffic, response times and errors, sent to the team's Slack.
Technology choices
We picked AWS in London to keep customer data in the UK and latency low. Containers meant the existing application moved with very few code changes. GitHub Actions runs the pipeline the team already knew, and Terraform means nothing is set up by hand.
The results
Hosting costs fell by 40%, the site has held 99.99% uptime since the move, and the migration itself took zero minutes of downtime. The team now deploys several times a day instead of once a fortnight.