Customer Stories / Hospitality
2016
McDonald's Drives Cloud-Enabled Digital Transformation on AWS
McDonald’s Corporation, an American hamburger and fast food restaurant chain, serves 69 million customers each day. Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), it transformed itself into a digital technology company that was able to beat performance targets by up to 66 percent and complete 8,600 transactions per second via its point-of-sale (POS) system.
In 2016, McDonald’s Corporation CTO Tom Gergets joined Andy Jassy on stage at re:Invent to talk about becoming a modern, progressive burger company—providing customers with more personalized, convenient experiences. He also talked about choosing AWS and AWS Professional Services to help McDonald’s build a scalable, secure digital platform.
Since then, McDonald’s has scaled its digital capabilities across the globe through Kiosks, Digital Menu Boards, Mobile Order and Pay, and Delivery. In 2019, McDonald’s acquired Dynamic Yield and is using state-of-the-art decision-engine capabilities, including machine learning and predictive algorithms, to help personalize the customer experience in their Drive-Thrus. The company is also building out its Global Data Platform on AWS, using Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, and Amazon EMR, and has started a pilot with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).
For cloud we found a partner in AWS. We knew they had the reliability and the cat capacity to support the needs of our digital platform.”
Tom Gergets
Chief Technology Officer, McDonald’s Corporation
AWS Services Used
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift uses SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes, using AWS-designed hardware and machine learning to deliver the best price performance at any scale.
Amazon Athena
Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive analytics service built on open-source frameworks, supporting open-table and file formats. Athena provides a simplified, flexible way to analyze petabytes of data where it lives.
Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR is the industry-leading cloud big data solution for petabyte-scale data processing, interactive analytics, and machine learning using open-source frameworks such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, and Presto.
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. In the cloud, Amazon EKS automatically manages the availability and scalability of the Kubernetes control plane nodes responsible for scheduling containers, managing application availability, storing cluster data, and other key tasks.