When UK monopolies watchdog the Competition and Markets Authority
(CMA) gave the green light to online food delivery service Just Eat’s
£200 million acquisition of Hungryhouse in November 2017, its decision
was based partly on its belief that the combined company will continue
to face stiff competition from well-funded rivals with strong brands –
namely, Deliveroo and UberEats.
Both companies have aggressive expansion plans, so it’s never been
more important that Just Eat’s website and mobile apps can take the
strain on holidays and weekends, when the public’s appetite for pizza,
prawn korma and Pad Thai soars.
There’s a lot of complexity, however, behind Just Eat’s customer
front-ends, which serve around 19 million customers across 13 different
countries worldwide (10 million of whom are in the UK). According to the
company’s director of technology Richard Haigh, what customers see as
‘the product’ is made up of around 400 discrete services, each typically
managed by its own team, he explains:
So a service could be something as customer-facing as the iOS app, or
it might be more back-end, like a service that talks to order pad
systems in restaurants that the staff use to manage incoming orders. Or
it could be a data store; we run many large SQL databases and each of
these might be worked on as a service by a dedicated team.
However diverse they are, what services tend to have in common are
their dependencies; in other words, the vast majority interact with
other services. It’s that complex mesh of technologies that make up the
full Just Eat product suite and understanding what’s happening within
that mesh is key to tackling issues before they become apparent to
hungry customers, says Haigh.
This is where the company’s Spring 2017 implementation of Application
Performance Management tools from AppDynamics comes in. Says Haigh:
We’re clearly dealing with significant technical complexity and scale
and part of what my team does is to provide monitoring, logging and
alerting services across this infrastructure. So we’re really interested
in knowing what ‘normal’ looks like, so that we can recognise
‘abnormal’ when we see it. What AppDynamics has given us is the ability
to get a very clear view of what’s going on.
Information
Just Eat relies heavily on open source tools to provide monitoring
and logging for its 400 services running across thousands of Amazon Web
Services (AWS) instances in the cloud, as well as for an alerting system
–but AppDynamics sits on top, providing a ‘single pane of glass’ into
the entire estate, through dashboards tailored to roles and
responsibilities.
At a glance, says Haigh, it’s easy to see how Tier 1 and Tier 2
services are performing; the former are the services that need to work
for a customer to successfully place an order; and the latter are
services that provide background support to the restaurants that receive
the orders. In other words, these are the services that are most
critical to an order being taken and fulfilled. If developing issues are
spotted early, Haigh’s team can intervene, delivering a triage service,
so that problems are nipped in the bud.
AppDynamics has been so successful at Just Eat, he says, that he’s looking to expand its use:
Whereas we started with basic instrumentation around our core
services, we’re now adding other services that we think are important
enough to warrant being ‘up in lights’ on our dashboards. We’re also
using AppDynamics to develop a number of new dashboard designs so that
as well as the high-level view, we can also have dashboards for
individual feature teams that really care about a subset of a service,
so they can see the nuts and bolts and dependencies, but within the
specific context of their particular domain.
It has also helped his team spot dependencies that are no longer
required, allowing to make code changes and simplify the estate as part
of general good housekeeping, he says. Finally, knowing whether or not
systems and services are under strain provides valuable clues to the
cloud-based resources that Just Eat needs to keep running at its busy
and not-so-busy times:
It could be that there’s been a lot of marketing around a particular
weekend and customer demand is high. I’ll want to know how much stress
that’s placing on our infrastructure so that I can scale up our systems.
Or it could be that we’re having a quiet day and actually what I’d like
to do is scale down, saving money for the business. It’s given me a lot
of flexibility here.
But what’s most important, of course, is staying up and running.
Using AppDynamics flow maps, my team can very quickly identify if
something looks like it might be going wrong, and identify which teams
are involved there. We’ve certainly had events where we’ve seen
information through AppDynamics early enough and engaged our teams on
triage so that it never became a problem for customers.
Source :
http://www.comeneat.com/blog/just-eat-delivers-on-its-appetite-for-information-with-appdynamics/
