Offline cups, Online lips: How’s the Cloud straw at Faasos wiping away that slip?

Pratima H

MUMBAI, INDIA: From 75,000 customers to 120,000 and growing. An 80 per cent jump in partner growth and a considerable spike in availability zones. Last week at AWS Summit 2017 in Mumbai, when Dr. Werner Vogels, Global CTO, Amazon was proudly reflecting on the company’s galloping stride that it has managed in a matter of 12 months since it set anchors in India, it was both a matter of surprise and matter-of-fact stoicism.

After all, India has been a paradox of sorts when it comes to riding technology waves. Cloud, and specially Public Cloud, glided smoothly into that very bracket for Indian enterprises as potential customers salivated at some huge advantages and yet, couldn’t take their eyes off from the what-ifs that flanked every tempting number.

What has changed then? A quick word with the partners and users at the massive conclave in Mumbai distilled two main observations worth chewing over: First, Amazon’s Cloud foray is invariably among the top three names in every potential (even hesitant) customer’s consideration list. A lot of that can be attributed to its well-stacked buffet of offerings, a smooth and consistent customer experience that many users swear by and a strong suit of services. Second, others are furiously trying to catch up and skepticism around data sovereignty because of the perceived lack of local infrastructure may just give Microsoft and others that slight nudge they need against AWS’ frenetic growth. AWS, on its part, informs that with AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region that was launched in June 2016 with two Availability Zones - local footprint is not an issue.

Yet, despite that warm lap of customer confidence and evolution on the aspect of localization, AWS continues girding its gear for specific segments and needs. Start-ups and digital enterprises are using that intravenous shot of quick scalability that Cloud offers with evident success and satisfaction.

Dr. Vogels uttered these lines when he talked about the super-sonic powers that Cloud, as he believes, allows its users when they want to scale and innovate. “Cloud is the new normal. You can almost do anything you want. We give you all possible tools you can use and we will make sure you have choice.”

So is Dr. Vogels right? Is AWS indeed the Q he promises for Bonds caught up with chasing innovation and tech-entrepreneur plots?

Let’s ask the CTO of a company that is today a notable Food-Tech name in India. It started five years back but today operates in 15 cities, serves from 140 locations and handles an average of 15,000 meal orders a day. Chances are, you would have used its website or app, or kiosk, or hotline to eat the burger at lunch yesterday or the Biryani this weekend. It’s called Faasos and Soumyadeep Barman, CTO tells us how exactly technology ingredients like Cloud are whipping up the Fast in Faasos.

Vanilla question first: Why cloud, why cloud at all?

Two and half-years’ back, we were very much a brick-and-mortar business. But manpower etc. is not exactly scalable when you want to grow the way we wanted and the way this space woks. We started enabling things with technology and building our own apps teams. You can look at five million downloads with lots of active users, driver apps, APIs for third-party integration etc and get a sense of how huge and complex and agility-led this can get.

So we needed to move to real-time data and analysis. For that, we had to have Cloud to be on top of everything. The reports had to be crunched from 15 days to per-second kind of time-windows. We needed a cloud platform that was not just cost-efficient but also highly flexible.

Why and where does it fit well with what you do eventually?

A meal ordered online has to arrive at the right doorstep within minutes and there’s a lot of work that gets done behind the stage. Technology has to be in the right shape and at the right scale to support ingredient procurement, order delivery, meal space, distribution and of course, for co-coordinating it all with an on-demand pace.

But why AWS?

We considered other options too. AWS gave us powers with relational database managed services and Aurora that gives a boost to decision-making. Database is an integral part of entire architecture. They also trained the team and worked on the entire architecture with a lot of helpful hand-holding. We loved the seamless migration to AWS.

Have the discount-candies that most cloud players were engaging in restlessly really worked?

Discounts won’t take you to the next level. What matters ultimately is the customer experience. Else, no one will come back.

Which areas have you applied it for? How has it all tasted so far?

Tastes great! For one: The kind of questions that come as one innovates, those questions stopped popping. We can get AWS on credit, do a POC and decide either ways depending on how the trial works. We are using AWS’ tools extensively – think heat map, tracking, web apps – everything. EC2 instances run the website, app and internal systems with analytics. We use Cloudfront and WAF etc. for web platforms. We use S3 (Simple Storage Service) for storing product-related imagery, ElastiCache for application performance. We have Auto Scaling too to quickly scale up EC2 instances before large events like festivals and we can also scale them down in lean periods.

Almost all workloads are on AWS. We are now running website, mobile app and internal system on AWS and have grown business by up to 30 per cent a month, increased sales through mobile app by about 78 per cent. We have also scaled massively to align with a six-fold increase in requests during peak periods. There is no boundary with AWS. The decisions are smart and fast and they are based on data.

You were never bothered with outages and other Cloud-doubts?

Those things are inevitable, specially when you are trying to do something new. No one does, and can, guarantee 100 per cent availability. If they do, they are lying. It’s not about how many downtime-incidents one encounters, but how fast the back-up and DR is. Innovation can entail outages. It’s part of the process. It’s all about how soon you bounce.

What can be done better? By AWS and those who use it?

Hand-holding and knowledge building have to continue as strong focal points, especially at the scale that AWS is now. AI and the next breed of offerings would need companies like AWS to help with more than just a product-overview, and product-led webinars can be a good idea to progress on. Look for customer-optimisation and don’t be bound to something as a user. Tools only empower when you know how to use them for the actual customer.

(AWS' Clarification on data-related concerns: AWS has invested in local infrastructure to support our growing customer base and to address the data sovereignty issue. Large enterprises and startups are building their business in India, on AWS.)