Delivery Direto: Autoscaling architecture to keep up with business requirements
About Delivery Direto
Delivery Direto is a SaaS market startup providing a white-label delivery platform for restaurants and other establishments.
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Contact usWith an infrastructure based on Google Cloud solutions, the startup’s platform has remained stable even after a sudden expansion of its customer base during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Results
- Easy migration, implemented by just one professional worker in three months.
- Robust infrastructure, supporting a 3x expansion of the customer base in under one month.
- Automated management: less time spent on infrastructure and increased focus on development.
Autoscaling to handle frequent peak demand.
2020 was a watershed year for the delivery market in Brazil. When social distancing became a necessity and in-person customer service was consequently limited, product deliveries became a crucial strategy for commercial establishments to stay in business. A survey by Instituto Locomotiva, commissioned by VR Benefícios, found that the share of restaurants, diners, bakeries, and markets offering deliveries went from 49% before the COVID-19 pandemic to 81%. This figure should remain unchanged even after this period.
The team at Delivery Direto, a startup offering a customizable, white-label delivery platform for restaurants and other related establishments, quickly noticed that transformation. In less than one month, their customer base tripled and visits quadrupled, a trend in line with the nearly 250% increase in consumer delivery demand during the pandemic, as reported by consultancy firm Food Consulting.
Such a quick change and the emergence of new competitors might give a company cause to worry about its ability to adapt to the new scenario. This was not the case with Delivery Direto. “Having a good team and technology structures in place was a plus, because we managed to take that demand in stride. We already had infrastructure, technology, and a support and sales foundation,” says Allan Panossian, the company’s co-founder and CEO.
One of the factors enabling the startup to react quickly was the fact that its technology and business areas work in tandem, resulting in a segment-focused design for the platform architecture. Delivery Direto’s adoption of Google Cloud tools made it even easier to set up an environment ready for this great challenge.
Support from Google for Startups Accelerator
The startup has focused on building a sustainable architecture since its inception in 2016. Its founding team had already launched Kekanto, a shop and service guide that Google Play had twice chosen as the best Brazilian app. The CEO himself had already worked as a mentor in Google for Startups Accelerator (GFSA). Despite their robust tech foundation, the team realized the acceleration program experience could have many takeaways for Delivery Direto and applied for it as a participant in 2018.
Over the course of the program, the team learned about Google Cloud’s tools and the benefits they would get if they migrated from the provider they had at the time. One of the most influential factors in their choice was the financial aspect. With Google Cloud, the company pays for the service in Brazilian reais and does not depend on the fluctuating dollar exchange rate, which helps improve cost planning.
“Billing in reais provides huge business value. It’s a game changer, not just because the pricing in dollars varies, but also because the taxes you pay on it are not negligible for a startup’s modus operandi.”
—Allan Panossian, co-founder and CEO, Delivery DiretoGoogle’s support for the startup ecosystem was another standout for the team. The entire migration plan was structured with support from Google Cloud experts during the GFSA mentorships. The process, from planning and simulations to contingency planning and execution, took about three months and was implemented by a single professional worker: Alexandre Macedo, the company’s tech lead.
“All these stages showed us we could implement the entire migration in a few hours, late at night,” says Macedo. “In a way, we are always preparing for the worst, but everything went well. It was not very hard.”
Autoscaling: a keyword for the architecture
To build the new architecture, it was essential that the tools chosen provided autoscaling resources; after all, the deliveries segment has very specific hours of peak demand, mainly around lunch and dinner. “We have a predictable, but highly variable load. Without autoscaling, we would need to have enough to handle the highest peaks at all times and run as many servers as possible. That would end up wasting computing capacity, since we would be working with several servers and no demand for them,” the tech lead explains.
App Engine was the solution chosen to host the platform in a monolithic environment. The ease of management and setup of autoscaling resources increased the stability of Delivery Direto’s system, positively impacting on the end user experience. With their former provider, the platform usually went through periods of instability of up to 15 minutes as the tool launched new servers.
“Compared with other solutions we were using, App Engine required less time to set up and performed better, launching servers more quickly with fewer unstable periods.”
—Alexandre Macedo, Tech Lead, Delivery DiretoHaving a small ops team, the tools’ ease of use and integration and self-management assets were other important criteria for choosing the solutions. Cloud SQL, for example, is used for the automated management of the MySQL database, and surprised the team with its high availability and fault tolerance. Free from the need to assign workers to infrastructure full time, they were able to spend more time and effort developing the app.
Ready for a promising market outlook
The architecture in Google Cloud had already proven capable of handling the platform's typical peak variations, and the demand boom at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic reconfirmed its success. “We monitored as computing increased and upgraded when necessary. But it was a one-off thing. From a technological standpoint, we did not have any issues,” says Macedo.
“Building the architecture on Google Cloud made scaling much easier. We managed to triple the customer base and quadruple the volume of visits in a matter of days.”
—Alan Panossian, co-founder and CEO, Delivery DiretoAccording to the startup’s CEO, it is unlikely they will ever match the high growth of the first half of 2020, but the deliveries market has a promising outlook. Panossian believes demand will remain high and the technology team is still looking out for new possibilities in the cloud to ensure product quality and streamline their routine.
Besides App Engine, some services are being migrated to or built on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), so the teams can be more efficient when working with microservices. The goal is to migrate gradually so that each service the startup adds can be better controlled through GKE.
The pipelines currently used in GKE are being replaced by Cloud Build, which has the advantage of being serverless, thus eliminating the need to keep idle servers during periods of inactivity such as weekends.
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About Delivery Direto
Delivery Direto is a SaaS market startup providing a white-label delivery platform for restaurants and other establishments.