The rise of the app in everyday life has been a game changer for consumers, not least when it comes to shopping. But there’s been a gap in the market: ordering from local restaurants in real time, without lags of an hour or more between order and pickup. Tapingo is trying to change that. “Why isn’t it easier to buy food on the go, without having to wait to order, pay and pick up?” Asks Udi Oster, CTO and Vice President of Research & Development at Tapingo. The Tapingo team wanted to transform the way food is ordered and picked up, so they built a solution that is contextually aware and that integrates with the operations of local restaurants, using college campuses as a beach head.

To build an effective solution, the company had to face a few technical challenges: handling orders at peak times, minimizing lines at restaurants, and helping merchants manage inventory. During peak orders, Tapingo gets 75 orders a minute, which could slow the system and create lines for pickup. Inventory management is also a challenge. If a coffee shop gets 200 orders in an hour and runs out of espresso beans, the shop can’t call 200 people to change their orders. “Everything in the app must be ultra-real time, especially inventory — data integrity is super important,” Oster says. “Once the merchant informs us that they’re out of something, we inform our users. It’s a challenge to achieve high performance while managing inventory in real time.”

The company started out with a hosting and DNS service, building a sophisticated architecture that was meant to ensure stability. However, the system experienced high latency, sometimes as high as 50 seconds. “It was over-complicated and far too expensive for the resources we had at the time,” Oster says. Eventually, the company suffered an outage. “We got some harsh feedback on Twitter, posts saying ‘Tapingo just ruined my life,’” Oster continues. “We needed a system that was stable and always on.” The company needed a stable environment that enabled fast, personalized requests and responses, and started looking into cloud providers.