Performance Tuning and Database Migration to Azure

As a multinational fast food restaurant franchise in over 100 countries with nearly 37,000 restaurants, the customer wanted to enable franchisees and restaurant operators to drive their own localized pricing campaigns. To do this, restaurant operators needed to be able to quickly update their menus and populate the latest menu simultaneously across all ordering channels. Reasons for a menu update can be manifold: the restaurant runs out of a food item, a restaurant wants to drop the price on a food item because of a local college football game, etc.  Before the new system’s launch, updating and deploying a menu could take a full day, especially when thousands of restaurants were publishing simultaneously. For example, this bottleneck would be hit whenever a new food item was being launched nationwide, or a nationwide campaign was triggered.

Atmosera focused on debugging and optimizing the application and related databases. They optimized stored procedures and implemented needed changes with queuing in the application. The databases were migrated from on-premises SQL Servers to Azure SQL using the Database Migration Assistant (DMA) tool. Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code were used as the core dev and debugging platform. The applications were migrated to Azure App Service.

The user flow involves a franchisee drafting a new menu in the Menu Manager portal application, which is then validated and staged in respective databases by triggering a series of Azure functions. Once all databases report a successful stage, the current menu version is updated to the new one, and all new order transactions are directed to the new menu.

These tasks used to be performed using a monolithic application hosted on Windows servers, which had inefficient scaling and processing times. However, processing time has now been reduced to sub-minutes.

See Figure 1 – High-Level Conceptual Architecture