Company Profile

FreshBites is a rapidly growing restaurant chain based in Chicago, Illinois, with over 100 locations across the Midwest. Known for its fresh, fast-casual dining experience, FreshBites had an increasingly complex digital infrastructure, handling everything from online orders and delivery logistics to inventory management. The company needed a more reliable, scalable DevOps strategy to support its expanding network of restaurants and growing customer base.

Project Goals

The goal of this project was to implement a comprehensive DevOps strategy for FreshBites to:

  • Improve the reliability and scalability of their online ordering and delivery platforms.
  • Optimize their cloud infrastructure to reduce costs.
  • Automate deployment and monitoring processes for smoother operations across all restaurant locations.

Client Needs

FreshBites needed a solution that could:

  • Scale their infrastructure as new restaurant locations were opened.
  • Improve uptime for their online ordering and delivery systems, particularly during peak hours.
  • Ensure faster deployments of application updates without disrupting services.
  • Automate system monitoring to detect and resolve issues before they affected customers.
  • Reduce cloud costs by optimizing resource usage across their various services.

Duration

The project was completed over 12 weeks.

Engineers Deployed

Four engineers were deployed:

  1. Two DevOps engineers to manage infrastructure and automation.
  2. One cloud architect to optimize cloud resources.
  3. One software engineer for application integration.

Technologies Used

  • Cloud Provider: AWS (Amazon Web Services)
  • Containerization: Docker for containerizing applications.
  • Orchestration: Kubernetes for managing containerized applications.
  • CI/CD Tools: Jenkins and GitHub Actions for automated deployment pipelines.
  • Monitoring Tools: Prometheus and Grafana for system monitoring and alerting.
  • Database: PostgreSQL for managing customer data and orders.
  • Version Control: GitHub for code management.

Challenges and Solutions

One of the biggest challenges was ensuring the scalability of FreshBites’ online ordering system, which needed to handle traffic spikes during lunch and dinner hours. SAS implemented Kubernetes to orchestrate containers and auto-scale the system based on demand. This ensured that the platform could handle high traffic periods without downtime.

Another challenge was the complexity of their existing infrastructure, which had grown inefficient and costly. The solution was to conduct an audit of their cloud environment and refactor their services to be more modular and cost-efficient. By optimizing database queries and balancing workloads across multiple regions, SAS was able to reduce monthly cloud expenses by 30%.

The deployment process was manual and prone to human error, often leading to service disruptions. SAS set up a CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins and GitHub Actions, automating the deployment of updates with zero downtime.

Results

  • 99.95% uptime for online ordering and delivery systems after the implementation of Kubernetes and monitoring tools.
  • 30% reduction in cloud infrastructure costs due to resource optimization.
  • 50% faster deployment cycles thanks to the CI/CD pipeline, reducing manual effort and human errors.
  • Improved customer satisfaction with faster, more reliable online ordering, even during peak hours.