Peak traffic-resistant app for healthy eating at the office
Sustainable corporate catering with technology that grows with you
The development of Join Program's app has a unique timeline that unfolds during the (partial) closure of restaurants and offices. A collaboration between TrueFullstaq, digital agency Endeavour, and Vermaat Groep resulted in a scalable app that can handle peak loads.
A central program for healthy company food
"Join Program's program delivers healthy food for corporate catering in a new way. Three pillars are central: ecological, social, and healthy. In a central kitchen, our own recipes are prepared and delivered to the locations and restaurants of companies," says Mark Snel, Head of Product at Vermaat Groep, the company behind Join Program.
The Join Program app, developed by Endeavour in Angular and available for iOS and Android, is a central component. Mark: "Through the app, our customers' employees can pre-order their lunch, dinner, or food. This makes it easier for our customers to estimate how many employees eat at the office. The better we can align food production with employees' wishes and demands, the less food waste."
The app has significant complexity due to a variety of functionalities. Products can have multiple versions, and dishes are linked to daily and weekly menus. The app has a structure with different customers and locations of these customers, who sometimes have multiple dining facilities per location.
App development during a pandemic
The app was ready for launch just before the coronavirus pandemic broke out in March 2020. However, due to prolonged and successive lockdowns and work-from-home advisories, company restaurants and caterers were closed.
"We then continued the further development of the app without launching it. The app was launched in September 2021. Only in March 2022, after the last major coronavirus measures were lifted, did we see things pick up. As a result, we experienced extremely rapid customer growth," says Mark.
"During the further development, we changed and adjusted technical components, such as the switch from a JSON API to a GraphQL API. That helps us now in handling customer growth," says Yoeri Moens, Medior Software Engineer at Endeavour.
In search of hosting that fits scalability and growth
"During prototyping, we had the app on a single simple server, suitable for working toward a minimum viable product. With the view to ambitions, where Join Program also targets large companies, there was an immediate challenge for scalability," says Yoeri. "At that point, TrueFullstaq came into the picture, as Endeavour hosts many digital products with them. They help us with technical challenges and take all hosting components off our hands."
The app's backend runs on Laravel, with GraphQL API for communication with the front end in Angular. With a WebSocket connection, the app has real-time data without reloading. "Suppose there is only one of a product left in stock, and five people are viewing this product. If the last product is ordered, you want the others to see that in real-time," Yoeri explains.
Automatic deployments on Kubernetes thanks to TrueFullstaq
For app scalability, containerizing and deploying on Kubernetes proved an excellent option. "We set up the API to be stateless, to scale with horizontal pod autoscaling. We want to have multiple instances of the API running, so the app stays fast when traffic increases enormously," says Yoeri.
"Next, we put the app on a shared Kubernetes cluster from Endeavour at TrueFullstaq. Pretty soon came the idea for a separate cluster for Join Program's parent company, Vermaat Groep."
The team prepared the app for the new cluster in phases. "Thanks to TrueFullstaq, deployments now happen automatically with GitLab pipelines, Helm charts, and an up-to-date Kubernetes environment. We had some experience with it, but now we could professionalize this further."
Ready for peak traffic
For the Join Program app, scalability and handling peak traffic are extremely important. "Many users pre-order their food; some only do so during lunchtime. Between 10 and 1 PM, we see a lot more traffic," says Mark.
Guido Laout, business development director at TrueFullstaq: "This is a project with enormous certainty of peak traffic. At peak moments, there are thousands of simultaneous users. That's why we chose a setup that gives Vermaat the greatest possible flexibility and with which proactive scaling is a matter of seconds."
Mark: "By thoroughly examining performance, identifying and adjusting bottlenecks, the app is faster and the loading time shorter. We need to keep it that way as the number of users increases significantly."
