Van Duijnen

Van Duijnen Horeca Service has been using our knowledge and experience for many years. For this highly appreciated client we developed the DashBar system. To guarantee the performance and stability of the system in the future, Van Duijnen Horeca Service opted recently for the migration of their online services to a new Amazon cloud environment.

SUMMARY

Being the largest independent technical service provider for the beverage-providing hospitality industry in the Netherlands, Van Duijnen  had several business risks which had to be solved in order to gain competitive advantage and stay on the steady growth path.

These risks were to be solved by moving to a more resilient, scalable and secure IT environment which had to be found. Amazon Web Services (AWS) corresponded to Van Duijnen’s high requirements and demands. 

Due to the proven by time trust relationship between Synadia and Van Duijnen, Synadia was privileged to perform the migration to AWS.

In just few months Synadia re-architected the existing solution and moved it to the AWS cloud bringing multiple benefits to Van Duijnen:

  • Improved Performance and Scalability

  • Close to Zero operational support

  • Improved Availability and Durability

  • Disaster Recovery

  • Reduced business risks

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ABOUT VAN DUIJNEN HORECA SERVICE

Van Duijnen is the largest independent technical service provider for the beverage-providing hospitality industry in the Netherlands. Van Duijnen supplies, installs, maintains and cleans cooling and tapping installations and provides tap automation.

Tap automation saves a considerable amount of money on a drink purchase by tapping each drink with the correct dosage (minimizing tap loss) and registering each tapped glass, so that inventory stays under control at all times.

Van Duijnen is a partner of hundreds of independent hospitality companies as well as a selected service partner with breweries, wine and beverage wholesalers such as Heineken (Amstel, Brand), Bitburger, PALM Breweries, Groupe LFE and Verbunt wines.

“With the migration to Amazon within Van Duijnen, we are future proof!  A solid base for our tap automation platform Dashbar and the flexibility to scale up and down for each customer every minute.”

Jasper Sonneveld | Commercial Manager Van Duijnen Horeca Service

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WHY APN PARTNER

No secrecy here, Van Duijnen and Synadia partnered before, and, when the need to move forward has arisen Van Duijnen contacted Synadia in the first place, it was a pleasure for Synadia to accept the challenge.

  • Proven by time trust relationship between companies

  • Knowledge and deep understanding of Van Duijnen’s business

  • Lack of bureaucracy and extreme agility

  • Simplicity and transparency

THE SOLUTION

Synadia decided to build three-tier solution in Ireland. VPC is spanned across three availability zones. Route 53 serves application requests and forwards them to CloudFront with Elastic Load Balancer serving as the origin. Elastic Load Balancer distributes requests across all zones based on the health of resources forming Web and Application layers. Instead of classic EC2, Synadia used ECS Fargate clusters for Web and Application layers for this project. 

Redis ElastiCache was placed between Application and Database layers improving the performance of the solution by storing frequently accessed data items in memory, so that these items are retrieved without the need to query the database layer.

All infrastructure was deployed as code by Terraform using SSM to store all parameters necessary for the deployment job.

S3 was used to store logs and Terraform state, SNS was used for notification purposes.

The list of key services include: Relational Database Service (Aurora Serverless), ELB, NLB, ECS Container Service, VPC, ElastiCache, EC2-Instances, Route 53, CloudWatch, Key Management Service, ECR Container Registry (ECR), CloudFront, S3, SES, SSM Parameter Store.

VDAWS Migration - High-level Architecture

“We worked together (side by side) to develop a state of the art concept/product. During the process we actually acted as partners.“

Christiaan Knopper | Project leader Van Duijnen Horeca Service

RESULTS AND BENEFITS

The new solution runs in Ireland region, it was built within three months using DevOps development method. It is fully re-architected, designed for failure and as a result:

  • It is possible to match deployed capacity to the incoming application load. Scaling up cluster instances and service tasks when needed and safely scaling them down when demand subsides keeps Van Duijnen out of the capacity guessing game.

  • The concern of losing service during peak hours is in the past, the provided solution is spanned across three availability zones and is able to tolerate a loss of two at the same time.

  • Having used Terraform, Synadia was able to utilize Infrastructure as Code approach to provision automated deployments. When necessary, it is possible now to spin up the exact replica of the solution, perform needed tests, create lessons learned log and shut the environment down to save costs. If necessary, it is possible to deploy this solution in another region within a few hours rather than weeks.

  • The provided solution does not require additional human resources for operational activities. Due to serverless building blocks, it is simply not necessary to maintain compute, storage and database infrastructure elements – it is all done by AWS as part of provided service. 

  • AWS and Synadia enabled Van Duijnen to simply focus on their core business and do what they are good at leaving technology constraints behind.

BENEFITS

Peak service demands on the provided solution result in the automatic starting and stopping of additional resources, ensuring customers are not impacted by the additional load. Database, application and front-end are segregated and can be scaled up independently from each other.

Both Van Duijnen and Synadia have freed up valuable staff resources.

Van Duijnen reduced risks to its business and operations by moving to a more resilient, scalable and secure IT environment.

Synadia was able to improve the overall availability of the application by splitting resources that were previously clustered in a single server.

Disaster Recovery is embedded into the design, there is no need for a separate DR environment.

NEXT STEPS

As you have already learned, in this project Synadia just migrated the existing infrastructure into the AWS cloud and used ECS containers to run the current workloads. The next step in the migration journey might be refactor the application.

The truth is that the current application and its databases were not built with SaaS in mind. So, should Van Duijnen decide to take the next step to the serverless world and further benefit from cost savings and flexibility, the existing application will need to undergo significant refactoring, meaning rewriting significant portions of the application code.

“Thanks to AWS our customers like venues, fooball stadiums, bars and restaurants can always dose and register the drinks they are serving.“

Paul Kragten | Owner Van Duijnen Horeca Service

Configuration of the Medmaster by Synadia

About Synadia Software

Synadia is Select Consulting Partner founded in 2016 with a strong focus on serverless, IoT and industrial cloud solutions. Synadia is a young, ambitious and innovative company which firmly believes nothing is impossible. 

The Synadia explorers use innovation to create new opportunities. To allow things to happen which their clients never thought possible before. Synadia’s ambition is to get advanced partner status next year. Synadia practices DevOps and Continuous Delivery in every project they do.