Domino's moves online ordering from AWS to Azure

Domino’s Pizza is counting down the days until its core online ordering system starts taking pizza orders on a new Azure platform-as-a-service environment in Australia.

The retailer recently made the decision to take the OneDigital system out from AWS globally and shift it onto the Microsoft cloud technology.

Domino’s has used Amazon Web Services as its hosting partner for all its critical systems for around the last four years. It has a small number of systems - like Exchange, which it is currently moving to Office 365 - housed in a server room in Brisbane.

While the majority of its core platforms will remain in AWS, late last year the pizza chain decided to move its .NET proprietary OneDigital platform into Microsoft Azure PaaS globally.

OneDigital is the online ordering platform that is used by all Domino’s markets across the globe to process orders.

Unlike Domino’s infrastructure-as-a-service environment with AWS, Azure PaaS offers the pizza chain support for the entire web application lifecycle via servers, storage, and networking alongside development, business intelligence, middleware, and database management tools, among others.

“By going over to PaaS we believe that we’ll be able to advance our regional high availability, better contain our development costs - because we’ll be able to utilise a lot of the standard Azure services - gain massive scalability, and bring the experience closer to users," CIO Wayne McMahon told iTnews.

Each Domino's region’s instance of OneDigital will be hosted centrally, but all instances across the globe will be able to process orders from any of Domino’s regional operations.

“If for instance an A/NZ order hit the closest instance [in the country] and it wasn’t available, it would go to the next closest available, and so on,” McMahon said.

However, the retailer will ensure orders in regions with privacy regulations will only be processed locally so as to avoid taking risks with customer privacy.

Domino’s Pizza Australia and New Zealand is in the final stages of testing for Azure, with live orders “imminent”, according to McMahon. Japan will shift in the next few months, with European markets to follow after.

The company is aiming to be fully migrated globally by the end of the current financial year.

But McMahon says there is no plan to shift any of the pizza chain's other core systems out from the AWS environment and into Azure.

“AWS is still an incredibly critical partner for us. There’s no compelling reason to move our other critical systems,” he said.

“They won’t necessarily benefit from PaaS."

Cleaning up code

Domino’s has taken the opportunity to embark on an improvement program which involves optimising the thousands of services associated with the OneDigital platform.

“We’re harnessing the PaaS opportunity by not just taking the services and moving them over, [but rather] going methodically through every service to make sure it is optimal,” McMahon said.

The IT team started cleaning up code and “finding better ways to do things” last September and has since completed the process.

Big pieces of work included a rewrite of the service layer given the move from SQL Server in AWS to DocumentDB in Azure, McMahon said - “really critical pieces of our architecture to do with pricing and vouchers, and the way we handle them”.