Blue Bottle Coffee Enhances Customer Satisfaction with AWS Cloud Migration

Blue Bottle Coffee (BBC) is a renowned coffee roaster and retailer with an international network of cafes in the U.S. and Japan. The company offers its coffee products through wholesale partners. BBC is known for its commitment to quality and customer satisfaction, which it achieves through rapid product updates and continuous innovation. However, the company's growth and expansion were being hindered by an inefficient and insecure IT infrastructure. The infrastructure was distributed among several cloud providers, which increased the total cost of ownership and slowed down the time to market for their products. BBC needed a solution that would not only secure and optimize their IT infrastructure but also enable them to accelerate their deployment process and reduce operational inefficiencies.

Blue Bottle Coffee (BBC), a global coffee roaster and retailer, was facing significant challenges with its IT infrastructure. The infrastructure was insecure and distributed among several cloud providers, lacking a DevOps approach. This situation increased the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and slowed down the time to market for their products. BBC aimed to assemble and optimize the disjointed IT-infrastructure elements to increase the security of the entire ecosystem. They also wanted to implement Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to accelerate and facilitate the deployment process by eliminating manual operations. Operational inefficiencies were causing high TCO and slow Time to Market (TTM), keeping BBC’s engineering team occupied with non-strategic tasks. BBC approached Provectus to prepare their IT-infrastructure for AWS migration, optimize and enhance its deployment process, and make BBC’s entire ecosystem more secure, which would allow the company to further spur its expansion, both in the USA and abroad.

Provectus re-architected applications and microservices to prepare and migrate Blue Bottle Coffee’s infrastructure to the AWS cloud. They implemented new highly automated CI/CD pipelines, introduced enhanced security layers, and improved monitoring and alerting systems. The migration to AWS was done in several stages, including preparatory work for the migration from Heroku and DigitalOcean, implementing CI/CD pipelines, fixing security and monitoring issues, and moving all services to the AWS cloud. To optimize the network infrastructure, a separate Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for Staging and Production environments was created. CI/CD pipelines for microservices were redesigned and enhanced, with focus on automatic builds and tests on pull requests. Deployment operations were unified; monitoring and log aggregation were improved by migrating all services from Elastic Beanstalk to ECS and implementing Parameter Store to configure services and Amazon Cloudwatch with ELK stack to collect logs and metrics from all services. Provectus also installed OpenVPN to give access to internal resources, configured separate IAM roles for services, created unique ssh user and ssh key for developers, installed Ansible for management ssh keys and ParamStore for sensitive data, implemented AWS Security Manager, restricted public access to Bluebottle DB, updated PagerDuty rules, and enabled SSL certificate creation via LetsEncrypt and AWS Certificate Manager.

• The migration of Blue Bottle Coffee’s IT infrastructure to the AWS Cloud resulted in a more secure, efficient, and cost-effective system. The re-architected applications and microservices, along with the implementation of highly automated CI/CD pipelines, enhanced security layers, and improved monitoring and alerting systems, unlocked the potential of the engineering team. This allowed them to prioritize complex development-based activities, thereby accelerating the product release cycle by 2x. The introduction of DevOps and the migration to AWS significantly improved the time to market and reduced the total cost of ownership by 50%, positively impacting the overall business performance. The new infrastructure also facilitated the company's expansion plans in the USA and abroad.

• 50% reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

• 2x faster product release cycle

• Significant improvement in Time to Market (TTM)