Gap Draught Case Study

Gap Draught uses AWS for a more reliable, scalable infrastructure that makes it easier to grow internationally. The company provides technology that helps bars manage stock better and bill more of what they pour. Its sensors in customers’ beer lines send data to Amazon EC2 instances for processing.

Bars can compare the volume of beer they pour for each glass sold instead of comparing total revenue with gross volume poured. This prevents bar staff handing out free drinks or pocketing cash for drinks they sell. It also shows when staff are wasting beer through excessive foaming, so bars know when they need to offer more training.

Breweries also benefit because they have precise and timely data about how their beers are performing at the taps. Plus, they have proof that bars are serving their beers within the expiry date using properly sanitized equipment, so consumers get their beer in the optimum condition. Gap Draught already works with hundreds of bars in South Africa. By Spring 2020, it will have 11,000 active taps in 3,500 bars. “Our success is down to the fact we can save bars money by reducing wastage down to 5-10 percent. And they can increase revenues by giving bars the controls to make sure they bill more of what they pour,” says Nezar.

To fuel its growth in 2020 and beyond, Gap Draught has moved from a single server with a local hoster to using multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“I knew AWS could help us improve uptime and scalability, but I was also excited about the more advanced services that we can tap into as our platform and business matures,” says Nezar. “Having more instances means more connections, and we can spin up new ones very quickly as we expand. Plus, AWS simply has better uptime, so our customers have a more reliable service.”