Quandoo: A recipe for restaurant success using data-driven insights
About Quandoo
Quandoo is an open marketplace with a mission to transform the world’s dining out experience. We connect restaurants and diners through a seamless reservation system and create innovative products to elevate dining out as we know it.
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About Endocode
Google Cloud Partner Endocode AG is a software engineering company that assists organizations with cloud computing migrations, deployments, and management.
Google Cloud and Endocode help Quandoo solve speed and scalability challenges associated with expanding its restaurant reservation and management platform globally.
Google Cloud results
- Enhances collaboration across a global team of platform developers
- Reduces spend on data warehousing solutions
- Accelerates a development pipeline through integrated DevOps and engineering tools
- Improves both developer performance by reducing cost and infrastructure constraints on provisioning
Consolidates disparate analytics and development solutions
Standing out from the crowd is critical in the competitive restaurant industry, and restaurateurs have to maximize the marketing impacts against their limited budgets. As diners become more tech savvy, online services that offer restaurant recommendations have become vital to attracting new customers.
While many of those services are largely focused only on the needs of potential customers, Quandoo created a platform that meets the demands of diners while empowering restaurant owners as well.
“A dining-out experience is not one dimensional. It depends on a variety of factors, including quality of service, food prep, menu, and more,” says Stephane Gamard, Chief Technology Officer at Quandoo. “Our goal is to provide a seamless, trustworthy resource to restaurants that help them flourish. That’s what separates us from others in our market. In addition to serving consumers, we are committed to helping restaurants execute their business plans.”
Quandoo expanded to 12 countries and 17,000 restaurants over the years, which meant more traffic on the platform and data generated from use. The company decided to migrate to Google Cloud with the help of partner Endocode to improve customer experiences and platform performance for business owners.
“Since we migrated to Google Cloud, we are seeing improvements in performance, reductions in digital spend, and ROI increases.”
—Stephane Gamard, Chief Technology Officer, Quandoo GmbHEnhancing behavioural data insights
“Our platform provides value by ensuring a restaurant’s visibility and presence on the right channel at the right moment for the right people,” says Stephane. “As you can imagine, this means we have to be able to rapidly source information, as each interaction with potential diners is a make-or-break moment.”
Quandoo traditionally ran its platform as a legacy monolithic application distributed in microservices and used separate solutions for data mining, analytics, and other activities related to tracking customer behaviours. The company recognized the need to migrate to a more advanced data warehouse, as its old solution had been costly and erratically managed.
BigQuery provided the first step into Google Cloud solutions for Quandoo, and it worked to delocalize its data warehouse for faster and more effective insights. The company then decided to further re-platform its backend environment using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). GKE helps the development team be more proactive in managing and refining the platform.
“We have not yet achieved a fully automated process, but since we migrated to Google Cloud, we are seeing improvements to performance, reductions in digital spend, and increases to our ROI,” says Stephane.
“Endocode brought a deep understanding of Google Cloud solutions, as well as the expert engineering and DevOps support we needed to complete the migration quickly.”
—Sergei Starikov, DevOps Engineering Lead, Quandoo GmbHLeveraging expert support to consolidate systems
Quandoo required further assistance throughout the migration given the complex processes in consolidating its development and delivery systems. Google Cloud introduced Quandoo to its partner Endocode, which immediately began work on streamlining the production environment.
“Our team’s capacity was tight, and we were just beginning to explore all of the features and capabilities of Google Cloud,” says Sergei Starikov, DevOps Engineer at Quandoo. “Endocode brought a deep understanding of Google Cloud solutions, as well as the expert engineering and DevOps support we needed to complete the migration quickly.”
Endocode helped Quandoo stand up several GKE clusters that could be automatically deployed with Terraform for the deployment, staging, and production stages of the DevOps pipeline. The partner also implemented several other Google Cloud solutions including Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud VPN, and Cloud Key Management for cost control, security, and speed improvements.
“We looked at Quandoo’s pipeline and realized it was not just a matter of migrating an application onto a new virtual machine,” says Johannes Amorosa, DevOps team lead at Endocode. “They needed a consolidated production environment that would accelerate deployments, improve testing, and make everything faster in general. It was a great experience helping Quandoo get the most out of Google Cloud.”
Endocode also helped to create development templates that boost CI/CD efforts through automation and infrastructure refinements. This allows Quandoo engineers and developers to swap in new microservices while leveraging many Google Cloud functions and features, further accelerating development and deployment.
“The ability to provision instances on the fly—or even make a complete Google Cloud project to use Google Maps API for research purposes—has stopped our teams from worrying how much technology they can use to support their work.”
—Stephane Gamard, Chief Technology Officer, Quandoo GmbHA holistic ecosystem for collaboration and development
Quandoo’s DevOps team, along with BI analysts and other staff globally, have seen many benefits since switching to Google Cloud. Engineers no longer need to take a conservative approach out of fear that costs would run too high, which had traditionally limited development and analysis.
“The ability to provision instances on the fly—or even make a complete Google Cloud project to use Google Maps API for research purposes—has stopped our teams from worrying how much technology they can use to support their work,” says Stephane.
The entire Quandoo team works on Google Workspace, which has improved team collaboration across regions. “Using Google Workspace with other Google Cloud solutions has made it easier to onboard developers, educate them on the registry and various services needed, and maintain transparency,” says Sergei.
Improving restaurant performance
The restaurant industry continues to become more competitive and reliant on technology. Quandoo intends to further refine its services to empower restaurant owners with actionable insights and more intuitive management tools.
“Our goal is to provide a platform that empowers people who love cooking to better manage all the aspects of running a successful restaurant,” says Stephane. “It’s not an easy task. By working with Endocode and Google Cloud, we can become more proactive in delivering analytics insights, platform features, and more to continually enhance restaurateurs' returns.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Quandoo
Quandoo is an open marketplace with a mission to transform the world’s dining out experience. We connect restaurants and diners through a seamless reservation system and create innovative products to elevate dining out as we know it.
About Endocode
Google Cloud Partner Endocode AG is a software engineering company that assists organizations with cloud computing migrations, deployments, and management.