Cloud Engineering Powers Business

Client

Vivino is the world’s largest online wine marketplace and most downloaded wine app where users can research, rate, review, and buy wines. With a scan of a wine label, the user receives instant information about that wine, such as user ratings and comments, prices, other wines in that segment, and complementary food pairings.

Because Vivino is powered by a community of millions, wine discovery and purchase are fun, accessible, and effortless for wine drinkers and for buyers of all quantities.

Challenges

Vivino was a small start-up with an original idea when Danish founders Heini Zachariassen and Theis Sondergaard began in 2010.  But they did not have the technical expertise to prototype their product. They needed quick turn-around from engineers to cover the full cycle of product development. 

Solution

Vivino came to Symphony Solutions in 2013.  The Symphony Solutions extended team provided Cloud engineers who prototyped the product and then created services for the new wine app. Here’s what they did: 

1. Created the architecture and infrastructure to accommodate the growing  database of wines, users, ratings, and prices;  

2. Migrated the codebase from PHP to GoLang; 

3. Developed new backend and UI features; 

4. Worked on database modeling and integration with new services; 

5. Supported and maintained data pipelines and processes. 

Once developed, the solutions need to be tested to minimize risks of broken software. Symphony Solutions manages the QA process which includes manual and automation testing. Manual testing uses extensive tooling and services to ensure high predictability and repeatability of the process, which in turn decrease the risk of faulty software.  These include: 

• backend (API) testing 
• frontend and UI testing 
• mobile testing for Android and iOS 

Automated regression testing was performed right before release to make sure that even a small change or addition to the software did not interfere with the functionality. The Symphony Solutions Auto QA team performs this regularly.

Symphony Solutions provides cloud engineers, who use AWS to power the business, especially important during periods of high load like Christmas and the New Year, when the system must meet user demand, as they scan labels of all types all over the world.

Symphony Solutions continues database management, cloud engineering, and development of new features for both mobile apps and Vivino website.

In summary, Symphony Solutions provided Vivino with our cloud native development services to create, in close collaboration with the client, secure, high-performing, resilient, fully monitored, self-documented and easy to use platform for development of cloud infrastructure.

To further reduce the needs of infrastructure management, simplify deployment and decrease TCO, Serverless framework with AWS Lambda, Step Functions and Batch are being used.

Symphony Solutions shared our passion and went all out to bring this unique and brilliant idea into fruition.

Birkir A. Barkarson, CTO, Vivino

Result

From a small start-up only 9 years ago, Vivino today is a market leader with a database of over 10.7 million wines and 36 million users. Vivino just surpassed the milestone of 1 billion wine labels scanned. These numbers increase at a greater rate each year, as more smartphone users enter the market and more people grow into wine-drinking age.  

The Symphony Solutions engineers have been with this project since the beginning and continue to support Vivino in its success.