Customer Spotlight: Popmenu
As a leading innovator in restaurant technology, Popmenu is on a mission to make profitable growth easy for all restaurants. Digital marketing, online ordering and on-premise technologies headline a powerful product suite infused with artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and deep data on guest preferences. The company consolidates tools needed to engage guests, serving as a digital control center for more than 10,000 independent restaurants and hospitality groups in the US, UK, and Canada.
Before adopting Control Plane, Popmenu faced challenges with their previous solution, Heroku. They struggled with limited flexibility in managing client domains and microservices, inefficient cost scaling, and constraints in meeting security and compliance requirements. These challenges hindered operational efficiency and developer productivity, prompting Popmenu to explore alternative solutions.
Limited Managed Solutions
Popmenu struggled to find managed solutions that offered a streamlined developer experience and robust security measures. This led to increased operational overhead and hindered developer productivity.
Inefficient Cost Scaling
The price scaling options offered by Heroku Enterprise fell short of Popmenu's expectations. They were in search of better price scaling mechanisms that would align with their budgetary requirements and provide more predictable cost management. Heroku also lacked the option to separately adjust CPU and memory for fine-tuning efficiency.
Security and Compliance Requirements
Popmenu faced stringent security and compliance requirements, including vendor security and application-specific DNS routing. Failure to meet these standards could lead to data breaches, regulatory violations, and reputational damage. While Heroku offers a more compliant private tier for their dynos/add-ons, it comes at an extreme price tier.
Deployment Flexibility Constraints
The deployment options provided by their current system lacked the flexibility needed to customize startup time, health checks, and autoscaling configuration. This restriction limited scalability and optimization.
“We were looking for a managed solution with a streamlined developer experience and better price scaling than Heroku Enterprise. We also had vendor security and application-specific DNS routing requirements, and Control Plane hit all the marks.”
Flexible Routing
Control Plane offers robust routing capabilities that perfectly align with Popmenu's needs. Whether hosting thousands of client domains from a single multi-tenant SaaS product or managing various microservices, Control Plane provides the flexibility to configure routing as desired. This ensures efficient traffic management and seamless operation of diverse workloads.
Enhanced Security Measures
Security is paramount for Popmenu. While Heroku offers a more compliant private tier for their dynos/add-ons, it comes at an extreme price tier. In contrast, Control Plane provides robust security features out of the box. With features like workload management, secrets management, and permissions, Control Plane enables Popmenu to keep data within their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without impeding developer workflows. This ensures data integrity and compliance with stringent security standards.
Seamless Environment Setup
Setting up multiple environments is effortless with Control Plane. Popmenu can easily configure separate QA, staging, and production environments that roll up to central billing. This simplifies the management of diverse environments and facilitates streamlined development and testing processes.
Real-Time Cost Reporting
Control Plane's real-time usage data empowers Popmenu to monitor costs and efficiency improvements across their services. This visibility into cloud expenditure enables informed decision-making, leading to optimized resource utilization and cost savings.
Deployment Flexibility and Simplicity
Control Plane offers unparalleled deployment flexibility and simplicity. Popmenu finds it as easy or easier to deploy application images compared to Heroku. Additionally, Control Plane allows for extensive customization of startup time, health checks, autoscaling configuration, and more, without the need for third-party add-ons. For example, unlike Heroku, Control Plane provides the ability to separately adjust CPU and memory settings, a significant advantage for fine-tuning efficiency. This simplifies deployment processes and enhances operational efficiency.
Built-in Metrics and Log Aggregation
Popmenu is considering moving away from external APM/log aggregation products, thanks to Control Plane's built-in Grafana support. This feature provides comprehensive metrics and log aggregation capabilities, allowing Popmenu to gain deep insights into application performance and operational metrics within the Control Plane platform itself.
Responsive Support
Control Plane's responsive support team has been instrumental in Popmenu's success. Over the past year, the team has provided excellent support and delivered on feature requests much more rapidly than any other platform Popmenu has worked with. This ensures smooth operations and timely resolution of any issues that may arise.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Popmenu's primary KPIs for measuring the success of Control Plane implementation include application performance and infrastructure cost/efficiency. By focusing on these metrics, Popmenu can assess the impact of Control Plane on their operations and track the effectiveness of their cloud infrastructure management strategy.
Terraform Support
Popmenu uses Terraform Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to create a unified configuration that seamlessly manages compute resources through Control Plane while efficiently handling database and networking components via AWS. ShakaCode, a key technology partner of Popmenu, assisted in implementing CI/CD for Popmenu using Terraform, significantly simplifying the integration between Control Plane and AWS. This integration streamlined the infrastructure setup, reduced the complexity of managing disparate systems, and minimized manual errors. As a result, the team achieved smoother deployments, faster updates, and improved scalability, leading to a more reliable and agile infrastructure management process.
“Over the past year the team has provided excellent support and delivered on feature requests much more rapidly than any other platform we’ve worked with.”