Starbucks
About Customer
Since the opening of its first store in Kuwait in 1999, Starbucks has been present in the Middle East and is operated by Alshaya Group, one of Starbucks' largest and longest-standing licensed partners worldwide.
Today, Alshaya Group operates more than 2,000 Starbucks stores in 13 countries including Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa (MENA), Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan, employing 21,000 green apron partners who serve over 1 million customers daily.
Starbucks, with over 31,000 stores in 86 markets worldwide, is the leading company in purchasing and roasting coffee.
Problem
The Starbucks Turkey Mobile Application operates within a structure with over 2 million users and facilitates over 50,000 transactions daily.
For such a large structure, it is essential for seamless operation and for third-party applications used within the app not to burden the system.
Following discussions with Starbucks, our client's identified problems are as follows:
The app does not perform as fast as required, and response time issues often occur.
Due to the Loyalty program not being designed to fit the existing structure, there are disruptions in the system.
There is a significant need for DevOps improvements, which has become a challenging process both in terms of time and budget.
Our Wallet application directly connects to banks, causing every request to be forwarded to the bank, slowing down the system and causing server crashes.
Developing, testing, and integrating new features into the system to adapt to industry trends and international innovations is a very exhausting process, leading to us falling behind in competition.
Due to the complexity of the system codes, it takes new personnel a long time to familiarize themselves with and integrate into the system.
Solution
As retter.io, in collaboration with Alshaya Group, we have decided to proceed with the restructuring and modernization of the system using AWS infrastructure.
To ensure the system operates as flexibly and performance-optimized as possible and to eliminate maintenance requirements, services on AWS have been optimized in a "Serverless" model.
To rid the system of dependencies on third-party applications and integration difficulties, the infrastructure has been completely transitioned to run on AWS Serverless resources using the Rio platform by retter.io for both the Loyalty and Wallet systems.
With the Loyalty and Wallet platforms operating on the same AWS infrastructure, queries are centralized, enabling load balancing in the system, meeting response times for customer requests, and ensuring uninterrupted operation of the system.
Through the Rio Platform, complex DevOps processes have been simplified with a single language progression using NodeJS, making processing, development, and updates easier.
Below is the architectural diagram of Starbucks' current system utilizing AWS infrastructure.
The AWS services utilized are as follows:
AWS Lambda
Amazon S3
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon CloudFront
AWS CloudFormation
AWS WAF
Benefits
Following the mentioned problems and the solutions we provided, below are the process improvements we have received from our client regarding the Starbucks App:
Performance has improved by 90%.
Costs have decreased by 65%.
Following the establishment of the structure in collaboration with Starbucks Turkey and retter.io, the budget and time allocated for DevOps development and monitoring activities have been reduced to "Zero."
The process of developing, improving, and implementing new features into the system has become 10 times faster.
With the transition of previously third-party integrated applications, namely Loyalty and Wallet, to the Rio-centric structure running on the AWS platform, system downtime has been reduced to "Zero."
Since the launch of the project, Starbucks Turkey has not spent any money or allocated resources for DevOps and monitoring.
Suad Candır
Alshaya Group Turkey IT Director
