Cases: Amazon Redshift – Skylark Restaurants

“Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed data warehouse that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze all your data using standard SQL and your existing Business Intelligence (BI) tools.”

Development of iOS / Android apps for Gusto, Bamiyan and Jonathan’s Restaurants, along with a truly «Cloud Native» infrastructure

Classmethod built the official apps (iOS/ Android) for Gusto, Bamiyan, and Jonathan’s restaurants, all restaurants are owned by Skylark Restaurants Co., Ltd. As of January 2017, an estimated 10 million people have already downloaded these apps.

About the Apps

Users can use these free apps for finding local stores, obtaining coupons, collecting loyalty points (Gusto restaurants only), and for staying up to date with special seasonal offers – all without having to provide any personal information.

With these apps, users can stay informed on the most current menu options, and also learn about calorie or allergy information of menu items.

Background of the Apps

The apps had to be highly scalable so that 10 million users could have a consistent and predictable experience. The architecture also had to be simple in design due to the merging of information from all three brands is profoundly complex.

For this app, our engineers combined the latest AWS managed products for essential app functions such as content delivery network, user authentication, push notification and data storage.

Our approach to developing these apps was to incorporate the agile strategy along with the scrum approach so that app users can engage with the best possible products.

Classmethod aims to work as one unified team with our clients. Therefore, we shared any, and all details during the project with Skylark, as well as conducted in-depth discussions with them whenever necessary, so that our team could fully understand the desired goals of their project

Classmethod’s development team worked from the early stages of development, all the way up to the final stages of daily operational duties. Classmethod also succeeded in cutting down on some operational tasks thanks to the following tools:

• Elastic Beanstalk: Reliable API service with Auto Scaling and Blue/Green deployment
• GitHub, CircleCI, CodeDeploy: Automated deployment and testing
• New Relic, Datadog, CloudWatch: Monitoring and alert notification with PagerDuty
• Elastic Container Service + Lambda + CloudWatch: Automatic batch processing

Based on each restaurant brand, Classmethod’s team carefully implemented the UX (User Experience). During the project, they continuously focused on both UX design and app performance.

To achieve true user engagement, Classmethod used Amazon Mobile Analytics for collecting data on how users interacted with the apps. To do this, we first collected relevant data in Redshift, then used Tableau to obtain answers to questions such as “How do users use this app?”, “Which features are most commonly used?” or “How effective was our strategy?”