Founded in 2013, Deliveroo works with more than 80,000 restaurants, delivering meals in over 500 cities across Europe and Asia. The company serves a three-sided marketplace of customers, restaurants, and 60,000 delivery riders. Success means understanding the needs of all three parties and balancing them so that all are satisfied.

Deliveroo relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in every part of its core business: accepting orders, transmitting them to restaurants, and delivering meals to customers.

AWS’s scalable infrastructure helps Deliveroo meet the fluctuating demands of delivering food in 12 markets worldwide, while machine learning (ML) and data analytics services provide the intelligence to manage delivery logistics and offer customers personalized restaurant recommendations.

Deliveroo’s demand fluctuates, with order volume spikes at lunch and dinner times, as well as special days, such as Valentine’s Day or the Game of Thrones finale, which can see demand increase by up to 400 percent. And because Deliveroo operates in multiple countries, it deals daily with multiple, sometimes overlapping, peaks. During World Cup tournaments, for instance, order numbers spike in different countries on different days, depending on who’s playing, as well as on Muslim feast days such as Eid al-Fitr.

When Deliveroo turned to AWS in 2017, this was a key challenge. Using AWS has allowed Deliveroo to meet demand and improve service quality, reducing food delivery times by 20 percent while also cutting costs.

The solution

Dealing with the spikes is just one of its challenges though. Deliveroo turned to AWS to prepare for the future and differentiate with a great customer experience, as well. To meet demand on backend and frontend apps, it moved to a containers architecture based on Amazon’s Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) for the load balancing, monitoring, and storage it needed. It also migrated its PostgreSQL databases to Amazon Aurora, with its improved throughput and scalability. A serverless architecture using Amazon DynamoDB to publish into managed Kafka clusters now meets Deliveroo’s variable demand on backend and customer-facing apps.

Every day is a test for a growing business. But Deliveroo was truly tested when 80 percent of Europe’s restaurants closed during COVID-19 lockdowns and demand for food delivery as much as tripled.

Food delivery is a highly competitive, low-margin business at the best of times. Deliveroo needed a solution that balanced speed and customization with the need to make money, especially during the uncertainty of the pandemic lockdown. Mike Rogers, senior engineering manager of Platform Group at Deliveroo, says this is where the AWS experience shone.

“From my viewpoint, this is where the relationship really came in. We said, ‘we’re not interested in growth right now, we’re interested in cash flow.’ AWS gave us different cost-reduction models and brought in people who could think about different things. It was really valuable, when things were down, to minimize the cashflow out, and then as we came back out of lockdown, we had different challenges.”

One way Deliveroo saved money was by scaling down little-used features. For example, the personalized list of suggested restaurants—auto-generated per user—was shorter as many restaurants closed, so it consumed fewer resources. Those resources were shifted to meet increased demand for the home page.

“With the flexibility of AWS, we can say we want to scale not just the entire operation up or down, but on a feature-by-feature basis. Being able to say how we want each one to respond to change in demand is pretty huge,” says Sprunt.

That flexibility lets Deliveroo keep innovating.

The company introduced new services, such as grocery delivery, during lockdown. Afterward, it scaled up deliveries and launched a new table service that allows customers to order food and pay for meals in a restaurant without interacting with staff.

Benefits of AWS