Customer Stories / Software & Internet / United States
Optimizing Microservices Architecture Using Amazon EKS with Harri
Learn how human resources technology provider Harri delivered seamless update deployments and 90 percent faster scaling using Amazon EKS.
80% faster
deployments of product updates to customers
Zero-disruption
deployments, even during peak times
90% faster
scaling in response to spikes in demand
30% compute
cost reduction while growing 20% annually on AWS
Improved
staff productivity and time to market using managed services
Overview
Harri, which provides human resources technology for the hospitality industry, needed to scale and deploy faster to serve its growing customer base of hotels and restaurants. The company, which uses Amazon Web Services (AWS), migrated to a containerized architecture using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed service to run Kubernetes on AWS. Using Amazon EKS, Harri successfully scaled while reducing compute costs and delivering better performance, speed, and reliability to customers.
Opportunity | Using Amazon EKS to Manage Containerized Microservices for Harri
Harri provides over 50,000 restaurant and hotel locations with human capital management solutions to hire, engage, and manage talent. As Harri’s active user base grew by 35 percent annually, its previous architecture strained to scale quickly when demand spiked. Harri also needed to deploy updates without service interruptions because its solutions involved critical customer operations such as scheduling, shift trading, and clocking systems.
In response, Harri migrated to a containerized microservices architecture. By designing small, optimized container images, it could run multiple containerized workloads on the same instance with faster startup times. Harri chose Amazon EKS to manage its containers. “We know how reliable AWS managed services are, so we decided to go with Amazon EKS knowing that our control plane would be highly available,” says Ahmad Al-Masry, DevSecOps engineering manager at Harri.
Amazon EKS offloaded a significant amount of work for our teams to focus more on business goals.”
Feras Kayali
Chief Technology Officer, Harri
Solution | Deploying 80 Percent Faster to Improve Customer Experience
Now on Amazon EKS, Harri’s solutions are equipped to handle traffic surges. Previously, the company overprovisioned in anticipation of traffic spikes. It took 5–7 minutes to automatically scale resources, and customers could experience delays while they spun up. Using Amazon EKS, Harri can spin up new microservice clusters in 20 seconds—90 percent faster. “We are a more resilient service using Amazon EKS,” says Feras Kayali, chief technology officer at Harri. “Our system can, in a timely manner, scale out and absorb surges in customer traffic, giving them the best experience possible.”
Because Amazon EKS offers efficient provisioning and node management, Harri can also deploy updates 80 percent faster without downtime or service disruptions for customers, even during peak hours. Harri has quicker times to market because it can deploy releases at virtually any time, which means that its product team can innovate without concern that new functionality might disrupt business operations. Because Amazon EKS is a managed service, Harri’s teams can spend more time delivering value rather than managing infrastructure or its Kubernetes cluster, further improving time to market. “Amazon EKS offloaded a significant amount of work for our teams to focus more on business goals,” says Kayali.
Harri has grown on AWS by 20 percent annually—adding new users and microservices—yet it reduced its compute costs by 30 percent. It optimized costs by migrating to AWS Graviton processors, chips designed to deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads. It also uses Karpenter, an open-source cluster automatic scaler, to keep instances fully optimized.
Outcome | Benefiting from Additional Managed Services on AWS
Harri plans to continue improving its solutions using AWS, particularly managed services.
“We adopted AWS early on, and we are happy with our choice,” says Kayali. “AWS keeps evolving and adding more services that often open our eyes to new dimensions.”
About Harri
Harri provides software solutions to the hospitality industry to help companies attract, manage, engage, and retain talent. It serves over 50,000 restaurants and hotels and four million hospitality employees globally.
AWS Services Used
Amazon EKS
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes in the AWS cloud and on-premises data centers.
AWS Graviton processor
AWS Graviton is a family of processors designed to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
Learn more »
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