Berlin-based food courier saves 70 per cent with Amazon EC2

Berlin-based food delivery service Delivery Hero has fleets across 39 countries, working with 310,000 restaurant partners and delivering 1 million food orders daily. Orders are taken through the online apps of the 26 brands serviced under the company’s umbrella.

Delivery Hero uses Kubernetes on Amazon Web Services (AWS), with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) its primary choice for orchestrating the company’s containerized microservices architecture.

It chose EKS because, as a managed service, Delivery Hero can delegate any infrastructure concerns directly to AWS, allowing it to focus on development. It took under six-months for Delivery Hero to fully transition its Kubernetes clusters to run exclusively on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances.

Since transitioning, Delivery Hero has saved around 70 per cent on its infrastructure costs. Vojtech Vondra, Delivery Hero senior director of engineering for logistics, said: “Our experience running Amazon EKS on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances was eye-opening. It has become a big cost saver and freed our time and energy to focus on business growth instead.”

Using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances has also enabled it to find new ways to make its applications more operationally resilient through finding techniques that add stability to applications. “Delivery Hero is experiencing extremely high growth, and with that comes big concerns about uptime and application availability,” Vondra says.

During migration, the company saw repeated issues with availability and termination. To assure high availability, Delivery Hero added redundancy by running multiple instances so that if one instance terminated, another started immediately. It also employed scripts so that terminations occurred gracefully, without leaving any open or uncompleted transactions.

Following the migration, all of the company’s logistics apps run on EKS and 90 per cent of its applications that use Kubernetes deploy on EKS. “Delivery Hero has always relied on the elasticity of the cloud,” Vondra said. “We’ve never considered operating pre-provisioned hardware. By relying on AWS infrastructure, we can concentrate on continuously improving our products and better serving customers instead of thinking about how we deploy and run our applications.”