Domino’s Case Study — AWS
Founded in 1960, Domino’s is the largest pizza chain worldwide, with more than 10,000 corporate and franchised stores in 70 countries. Pizza is the primary focus, with traditional, speciality, and custom pizzas available in a variety of crust styles and toppings. In 2011, Domino’s launched artisan-style pizzas. Additional entrees include pasta, bread bowls, and oven-baked sandwiches. The menu offers chicken side dishes, breadsticks, as well as beverages and desserts.
Domino’s is an increasingly digital business, with more than 70 percent of sales coming from online orders.
“Our investment in technology is a key ingredient to our growth as a business,” says Michael Gillespie, chief digital and technology officer for Domino’s. “We strive to use it to reduce pickup and delivery times, because we’ve identified that the sooner we can get a pizza to our customers, the more satisfied they are with their meal.”
Challenges faced by DOMINO’s before migration to AWS
Dominos’ order management system supports the major part of its business. While the customers could place orders through two interfaces — web and mobile, Dominos team was struggling with the performance issues of the order management system.
This mostly happened because many users’ browse menus and offers, but did not place an order and majority were not even logged into their system as customers. This resulted in high browsing load which the existing on-premise server could not handle. To combat the performance and scalability issues, Dominos wanted to migrate to AWS.
How AWS helped Domino’s ?
BlazeClan conducted an exhaustive study of the existing system and charted out a roadmap to migrate their order management system to AWS.
The team of certified SAs proposed the following solution to overcome this issue:
- Discovery of the existing architecture, assessing cloud readiness and designing of the AWS environment. This also included assistance in preparing the order management system cloud ready.
- Implementation of the AWS environment, setting up IAM user management and authorization authentication as per the underlying best practices. This also included migrating the order management system to AWS and setting up Cloud Front to provide a better browsing experience. Implementation of the auto-scaling groups with ELB to make the existing order management system highly scalable and elastic in nature.
- Testing of the order management system to validate support for 10s of thousands of concurrent users.
AWS services used by Domino’s
AMAZON EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.
It was used for computing capacity management for their application deployment. It helped in reducing the time required to spin up new server instances to minutes, allowing them to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as per their requirement
Amazon SageMaker
Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. SageMaker removes the heavy lifting from each step of the machine learning process to make it easier to develop high quality models.
Traditional ML development is a complex, expensive, iterative process made even harder because there are no integrated tools for the entire machine learning workflow. You need to stitch together tools and workflows, which is time-consuming and error-prone. SageMaker solves this challenge by providing all of the components used for machine learning in a single toolset so models get to production faster with much less effort and at lower cost.
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security and performance. This means customers of all sizes and industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics. Amazon S3 provides easy-to-use management features so you can organize your data and configure finely-tuned access controls to meet your specific business, organizational, and compliance requirements. Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9’s) of durability, and stores data for millions of applications for companies all around the world.
it was used to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere and everywhere
Amazon RDS
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability, security and compatibility they need.
Amazon RDS is available on several database instance types — optimized for memory, performance or I/O — and provides you with six familiar database engines to choose from, including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database and SQL Server. You can use the AWS Database Migration Service to easily migrate or replicate your existing databases to Amazon RDS.
This service was used to set up, operate and scale relational database and was mainly used for deployments
AWS GLUE
AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy for customers to prepare and load their data for analytics. You can create and run an ETL job with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. You simply point AWS Glue to your data stored on AWS, and AWS Glue discovers your data and stores the associated metadata (e.g. table definition and schema) in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Once cataloged, your data is immediately searchable, queryable, and available for ETL.
Some other services used by Domino’s
- AWS NAT Gateway was used to allow instances in a private subnet to connect to the Internet or to other AWS services.
- ELK stack was utilized for log aggregation and analytics. It is a combination of Elasticsearch (a NoSQL database and search server), Logstash (a log shipping and parsing service), and Kibana (a web interface that connects users with the Elasticsearch database and enables visualization and search options for system operation users). It helped in providing a centralized and searchable repository for all infrastructure logs, thereby providing a unique and holistic insight to the customer.
AWS Benefits
- High availability : Successful deployment of the order management system resulted in making the platform highly available in nature and now support 10s of thousands of concurrent users.
- Scalability : The Company achieved the ability to scale the application as and when required along with granular level control of the environment.
- Improved Performance : Migrating the application to AWS from the traditional data center, helped in improved performance as it could easily scale and meet the needs of thousands of users and processed all transactions with low latency
- Swift service : Assists Domino’s stores in achieving goal of pizza delivery in 10 minutes or less
- Accuracy : Deploys accurate, predictive ordering solution quickly and easily
“ Organizations of all sizes across all industries are transforming and delivering on their missions every day using AWS. ”
