TheFork: a migration project in full lockdown

During the health crisis, which greatly accelerated the digital transformation of the restaurant industry, TheFork's IT teams worked at full speed to support, accelerate and secure the reopening of restaurants, while migrating their hosted services to the AWS cloud. Among the ingredients for a successful migration, TheFork relied on higher scalability and performance, as well as renewed innovation capabilities.

In recent years, the growing success of TheFork has brought its share of challenges. Its growth has been challenged by a lack of agility at key moments for the startup, where the platform has seen record traffic rates: Valentine's Day, the annual “Tous au Restaurant” event, festivals with exclusive promotions, etc. TheFork is subject to recurring scalability and maintenance issues as their software was designed in a single monolith block.

After an incident during a bookings spike for Valentine's Day in 2020, TheFork decided to accelerate the transformation of its infrastructure to the cloud to increase scalability.

Cloud: two times as much capacity during peak periods

TheFork chose to host its services in the AWS datacenters in Paris, to reduce latency as much as possible with its historical host, and carry out the migration with the minimum of service interruption. Historically, the technical team prefers a “Build” (vs “Buy”) approach, but with the growth of the platform, it is becoming more tempting to take advantage of the time savings offered by AWS managed services, for example for databases with Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) that automatically come with backup (“snapshots”) and integrated monitoring. Teams can thus focus on developing new business features. “Whenever relevant, I will favor managed services to focus teams on our core business,” says Stephen Jannin.

Now, TheFork has the opportunity to bring more added value to its platform while improving everyday life for its teams as well as quality of service, a real force in the wake of Covid, a period of intense activity where TheFork was able to absorb up to 2x more traffic instantly and could double its capacity every minute. The startup largely attributes this agility, which was impossible before, to the cloud. “With the potential of the cloud, we will be able to improve our productivity and accelerate the pace of our deliveries to our internal customers,” explains Stephen Jannin.

Migration coupled with transformation

In order to migrate to the cloud, TheFork hired experts to completely rethink the technological foundations, with the ambition of greater resilience and greater scalability. In early 2019, the migration of the network, service orchestration and log management began. The first benefits came from migration of the application's search engine in June 2019, then the website for the “Tous Au Restaurant” event in September 2019.

Looking back, Stephen Jannin says that a “lift and shift” migration would have brought performance benefits more quickly, by relying on cloud hosting services like Amazon EC2. The modernization of the system with service orchestrator or managed databases could have happened later. However, the choice to rebuild solid foundations and then migrate provides less immediate value, but represents a real technological leap forward.

A real DevOps dynamic with Cloudreach, a certified partner

Recommended by AWS and renowned for its agility and international dimension, Cloudreach, an AWS certified partner, integrates the project in parallel with the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) and supports TheFork during all stages of service migration. With the support of the majority of TheFork developers, all “Nextgen” services - 80% of the system - were migrated to the cloud in just 4 months; a collective effort that demonstrates a successful DevOps approach.

Daily assistance for a smooth transition

The last phase of TheFork's migration started in 2021 and covered databases, three PHP monoliths (B2C, B2B and back office), network routing and DNS. A team of experts composed of Ops, architects and developers was mobilized for 9 months. Although this transformation brought about a lot of change, all their teams are now embracing it without difficulty. AWS teams were present on a daily basis and continued to provide TheFork with the help and advice they needed during dedicated, regular sessions.

Resilience and international projects: the future of TheFork

With the migration almost complete, TheFork's efforts are now directed at optimizing and monitoring their platform costs, resilience, and developer efficiency with the rapid provision of development environments on demand. The cloud will also offer new perspectives on the real-time exploitation of data from the Data Lake and the global coverage of AWS regions to ensure better performance internationally, such as in Australia.