Demae-can modernizes its system on AWS to quickly satisfy rocketing demand for online food delivery
CPU utilization was at 80 percent with a traditional database, but after offloading processing to AWS, we’ve cut it down to about 40 percent. As a result, we can confidently deploy marketing promotions and handle access spikes."
Hideoki Yoshikawa
General Manager, Development Management Division, Product Development Department,
Demae-can Co., Ltd.
Migrating to AWS to meet growing demand
Driving an incremental cloud migration
When the new system was ready for launch, AWS provided support to facilitate the transition to the cloud through AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) and workshops. Additionally, Demae-can adopted the Amazon Aurora managed database service in December 2020 to reduce load on the main database.
Demae-can’s main on-premises database could sometimes hit an 80 percent CPU usage and was difficult to scale in its data center. To offload high-load search requests, the enterprise used AWS Database Migration Service to create replicas on Amazon Aurora and ensured communication integrity with AWS Direct Connect. According to Okada, “We chose Managed Services based on our operations. After the migration, everything was remarkably stable.”
“We used Amazon API Gateway to adjust the flow rate to the main database,” explains Hideoki Yoshikawa, General Manager of the Demae-can Development Management Division. The company also uses AWS Fargate to optimize costs with dynamic scaling at peak times and leverages Amazon OpenSearch Service for quick product searches.
Demae-can initially used the PostgreSQL database on Amazon Aurora to handle operations with table configurations and queries based on the main on-premises database, which did not deliver the expected performance. “The hardware specs required by the main database were extremely high, so it seemed that a standard migration wasn’t enough,” says Atsushi Yamaguchi, who oversaw API-related development from the Demae-can Product Development Department. “However, AWS helped us achieve satisfactory processing performance by providing support for tuning queries.”
Ryo Utsunomiya, also from the Demae-can Product Development Department, worked on upgrading the free-text store search system: “We used to perform full-text MySQL searches, but the performance was poor, so we decided to rebuild the search system with Amazon OpenSearch Service.”
Achieving 118% year-on-year sales growth
By moving to AWS, Demae-can was able to handle soaring demand. In December 2021, the number of Demae-can affiliate stores surpassed 100,000. In 2022—approximately two years after beginning full-scale use of AWS—second-quarter sales reached 22.7 billion yen, 118.4 percent higher than the previous year.
The Infrastructure Group today no longer needs to provision resources like servers for separate teams; instead, development teams receive AWS accounts with resources deployed to each team.
“We’ve also improved user experience by enhancing server response and showing the locations of delivery drivers,” says Yamaguchi. According to Utsunomiya, replacing the search system with Amazon OpenSearch Service and tuning it has tripled the percentage of users who browse store pages from search results. “Improving search result accuracy was impossible for us before, so this is a tremendous achievement.”
Migrating to the cloud provided Demae-can with countless benefits including a modern system and capabilities for proactive advertising promotions. The organization is now sharing information with AWS teams to create plans for architectural optimization and risk avoidance. “We’re currently modifying applications as a first step,” says Okada. “New AWS services are constantly appearing, so we’re likely to replace some of our current services and continue to discover new service features to help us evolve.”
