Case study: Jimmy Brings reinvigorates its tech stack to meet customer demand

Alcohol delivery service Jimmy Brings refreshed its data stack to meet the increasing number of orders it was experiencing over the pandemic.

Adam Watt, head of engineering at Jimmy Brings told Digital Nation how Jimmy Brings went through exponential growth as the states started to lockdown.

He said, “We saw that our technology stack was ageing, it was built as a very early startup. We had this real problem of being on a platform that wouldn't scale out.”

“When we hit the pandemic, it hit hard. A lot of Friday nights, they're trying to get performance gains out of the system.”

The delivery company made a decision that they couldn’t hire to market so they looked to technology to lessen the workload.

“We made a decision that, we couldn't go and hire to market to get people to come on. The job market was extremely tight onboarding, that amount of developers to be able to do that amount of work in a short time is impossible,” he said,

“We'd heard about this amazing work that Contino had done internally of Endeavour group on one of the data platforms already. We reached out to them, had a quick chat about our problem and the solution that we needed was to move off our bare metal service system and into the cloud, which was our chosen partner of Google.”

Watt explained that implementing Contino nearly two years ago has given Jimmy Brings more time to focus on other tasks.

“For us moving to the cloud meant a whole relaxation of things that we used to have to do on a day to day. For us, our servers monitoring on an evening, during peak trade has gone. We can watch it flex out and scale backwards,” he said.

“We’ve got four alerting systems built by container in GCP. That, you know, give us page error alarms and things that we've never had before.”

Watt said it is the peace of mind knowing on a busy Friday night Jimmy Brings has enough capacity to “let the system go”.

“We can scale up, scale down and not have an issue,” he said.

One of the other reasons Jimmy Brings went through this process was because it was hard to buy servers, Watt explained.

“We were talking about six weeks lead time when we needed to scale and you can't do that in an on-demand business,” he said.

“When someone pulls the trigger and says everybody's in lockdown. We needed a partner like Contino to move us to the cloud quickly and safely, and then still be able to trade at full speed.”

Michael Ewald, director of technology at Contino said the company believes in the process of dual delivery.

“Not just delivering something handing over, but we want to make sure that the upskill is more than that, we're going to fit in with the culture,” he explained.

Ewald said Contino wasn’t just a technical partner, but a strategic partner.

“What I think what we also were able to do, is help with some of the key reliance on certain individuals in the team by educating and uplifting how to approach software in a cloud-native way,” he said.

“We de-risk key individuals having that knowledge because we are able to get a lot more people up to speed as well. It is a great experience and the Jimmy Brings people appreciated working with us and we appreciated working with them as well.”