Download PDF
Provectus > Case Studies > Blue Bottle Coffee Enhances Customer Satisfaction with AWS Cloud Migration
Provectus Logo

Blue Bottle Coffee Enhances Customer Satisfaction with AWS Cloud Migration

Technology Category
  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Middleware & Microservices
  • Networks & Connectivity - Gateways
Applicable Industries
  • Cement
  • Construction & Infrastructure
Use Cases
  • Construction Management
  • Infrastructure Inspection
Services
  • Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
  • Testing & Certification
The Challenge

Blue Bottle Coffee (BBC), a global coffee roaster and retailer, was facing significant challenges with its IT infrastructure. The infrastructure was insecure and distributed among several cloud providers, lacking a DevOps approach. This situation increased the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and slowed down the time to market for their products. BBC aimed to assemble and optimize the disjointed IT-infrastructure elements to increase the security of the entire ecosystem. They also wanted to implement Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to accelerate and facilitate the deployment process by eliminating manual operations. Operational inefficiencies were causing high TCO and slow Time to Market (TTM), keeping BBC’s engineering team occupied with non-strategic tasks. BBC approached Provectus to prepare their IT-infrastructure for AWS migration, optimize and enhance its deployment process, and make BBC’s entire ecosystem more secure, which would allow the company to further spur its expansion, both in the USA and abroad.

About The Customer

Blue Bottle Coffee (BBC) is a renowned coffee roaster and retailer with an international network of cafes in the U.S. and Japan. The company offers its coffee products through wholesale partners. BBC is known for its commitment to quality and customer satisfaction, which it achieves through rapid product updates and continuous innovation. However, the company's growth and expansion were being hindered by an inefficient and insecure IT infrastructure. The infrastructure was distributed among several cloud providers, which increased the total cost of ownership and slowed down the time to market for their products. BBC needed a solution that would not only secure and optimize their IT infrastructure but also enable them to accelerate their deployment process and reduce operational inefficiencies.

The Solution

Provectus re-architected applications and microservices to prepare and migrate Blue Bottle Coffee’s infrastructure to the AWS cloud. They implemented new highly automated CI/CD pipelines, introduced enhanced security layers, and improved monitoring and alerting systems. The migration to AWS was done in several stages, including preparatory work for the migration from Heroku and DigitalOcean, implementing CI/CD pipelines, fixing security and monitoring issues, and moving all services to the AWS cloud. To optimize the network infrastructure, a separate Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for Staging and Production environments was created. CI/CD pipelines for microservices were redesigned and enhanced, with focus on automatic builds and tests on pull requests. Deployment operations were unified; monitoring and log aggregation were improved by migrating all services from Elastic Beanstalk to ECS and implementing Parameter Store to configure services and Amazon Cloudwatch with ELK stack to collect logs and metrics from all services. Provectus also installed OpenVPN to give access to internal resources, configured separate IAM roles for services, created unique ssh user and ssh key for developers, installed Ansible for management ssh keys and ParamStore for sensitive data, implemented AWS Security Manager, restricted public access to Bluebottle DB, updated PagerDuty rules, and enabled SSL certificate creation via LetsEncrypt and AWS Certificate Manager.

Operational Impact

  • The migration of Blue Bottle Coffee’s IT infrastructure to the AWS Cloud resulted in a more secure, efficient, and cost-effective system. The re-architected applications and microservices, along with the implementation of highly automated CI/CD pipelines, enhanced security layers, and improved monitoring and alerting systems, unlocked the potential of the engineering team. This allowed them to prioritize complex development-based activities, thereby accelerating the product release cycle by 2x. The introduction of DevOps and the migration to AWS significantly improved the time to market and reduced the total cost of ownership by 50%, positively impacting the overall business performance. The new infrastructure also facilitated the company's expansion plans in the USA and abroad.

Quantitative Benefit

  • 50% reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

  • 2x faster product release cycle

  • Significant improvement in Time to Market (TTM)

Related Case Studies.

Case Study
IoT System for Tunnel Construction
The Zenitaka Corporation ('Zenitaka') has two major business areas: its architectural business focuses on structures such as government buildings, office buildings, and commercial facilities, while its civil engineering business is targeted at structures such as tunnels, bridges and dams. Within these areas, there presented two issues that have always persisted in regard to the construction of mountain tunnels. These issues are 'improving safety" and "reducing energy consumption". Mountain tunnels construction requires a massive amount of electricity. This is because there are many kinds of electrical equipment being used day and night, including construction machinery, construction lighting, and ventilating fan. Despite this, the amount of power consumption is generally not tightly managed. In many cases, the exact amount of power consumption is only ascertained when the bill from the power company becomes available. Sometimes, corporations install demand-monitoring equipment to help curb the maximum power demanded. However, even in these cases, the devices only allow the total volume of power consumption to be ascertained, or they may issue warnings to prevent the contracted volume of power from being exceeded. In order to tackle the issue of reducing power consumption, it was first necessary to obtain an accurate breakdown of how much power was being used in each particular area. In other words, we needed to be able to visualize the amount of power being consumed. Safety, was also not being managed very rigorously. Even now, tunnel construction sites often use a 'name label' system for managing entry into the work site. Specifically, red labels with white reverse sides that bear the workers' names on both sides are displayed at the tunnel work site entrance. The workers themselves then flip the name label to the appropriate side when entering or exiting from the work site to indicate whether or not they are working inside the tunnel at any given time. If a worker forgets to flip his or her name label when entering or exiting from the tunnel, management cannot be performed effectively. In order to tackle the challenges mentioned above, Zenitaka decided to build a system that could improve the safety of tunnel construction as well as reduce the amount of power consumed. In other words, this new system would facilitate a clear picture of which workers were working in each location at the mountain tunnel construction site, as well as which processes were being carried out at those respective locations at any given time. The system would maintain the safety of all workers while also carefully controlling the electrical equipment to reduce unnecessary power consumption. Having decided on the concept, our next concern was whether there existed any kind of robust hardware that would not break down at the construction work site, that could move freely in response to changes in the working environment, and that could accurately detect workers and vehicles using radio frequency identification (RFID). Given that this system would involve many components that were new to Zenitaka, we decided to enlist the cooperation of E.I.Sol Co., Ltd. ('E.I.Sol') as our joint development partner, as they had provided us with a highly practical proposal.
Learn more
© 2015-2024 IoT ONE Limited | Privacy Policy

Contact us

Let's talk!

* Required
* Required
* Required
* Invalid email address
By submitting this form, you agree that IoT ONE may contact you with insights and marketing messaging.
No thanks, I don't want to receive any marketing emails from IoT ONE.
Submit

Thank you for your message!
We will contact you soon.