Front Burner Restaurants is a privately held company of innovative restaurant concepts in the Southwest area. Our current concepts include: Whiskey Cake Kitchen & Bar, The Ranch at Las Colinas, Velvet Taco, Mexican Sugar, Ida Claire, Sixty Vines, The Keeper, Haywire, Unlawful Assembly Brewing Co, and Legacy Food Hall.
FrontBurner set out to unlock the hidden value of their data. A key enabler for its business was to modernize enterprise data access and enhance analytical capabilities. iOLAP and FrontBurner partnered together to define and execute a multi-phased data and analytics transformation roadmap. The Modern Data Platform then began.
FrontBurner uses several systems to operate its business including NCR, Aloha, toast, Microsoft GP, as well as external systems from OpenTable and marketing vitals. While these systems perform their independent tasks well, data availability to create robust consolidated reporting across lines of business and functional areas is challenging. To address current challenges and position the company for future data needs and opportunities FrontBurner was looking for a strategic partner they can work with to address their data and analytics needs.
During the Foundation Phase, the new FrontBurner the EDH was deployed to the business. The overall solution was well received as it:
FrontBurner required a modern architecture that could consolidate its existing disparate warehouses into a single enterprise data hub. Key capabilities were identified and aligned with the following AWS technologies: AWS Glue to ingest data from APIs or static files; Amazon Redshift for data warehouse database; Amazon DynamoDB used for job and database object metadata; Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for raw storage for landing and processed data; and Amazon Spectrum used to support data quality testing and raw queries.
Overview:
iOLAP DevOps practices were implemented from the very beginning following AWS Well-Architected Framework. Dedicated account was provisioned and configured using AWS Control Tower for each deployment environment (development, test and production).
All resources are defined and deployed using AWS CloudFormation which at the same time provides documented infrastructure definition, allows easy and consistent deployment across all environments and easy disaster recovery.
AWS services are used for all CICD processes: CodeCommit is used to store CloudFormation templates and all application related scripts and code. Developers commit changes which are picked up by the EventBridge event rule that starts CodePipeline job to build and deploy artifacts automatically using CodeBuild.
Solution design guideline was to utilize serverless services as much as possible to allow maximum flexibility with resource scaling, deployment and cost management.
AWS VPC provides fundamental network layer that is shared across all environments greatly cutting down on cost and still providing great resilience.
AWS S3 buckets are used as cheap, scalable blob storage with encryption and versioning features enabled.
DynamoDB is used as fast, reliable and very cheap production-ready control database for Glue jobs.
AWS Glue Jobs, Workflows, Triggers, Databases, Tables and Crawlers are used to orchestrate entire ETL process and hydrate the datalake with fresh, well-structured data multiple times a day.
Custom containers executing DBT model transformations jobs are scheduled and executed on AWS ECS Fargate with minimal cost and background infrastructure configuration.
AWS Redshift as production ready data warehouse (lakehouse) is central application component holding data ready and easily accessible for any analytic processes.
SSM Parameter Store and Secrets Manager are used to securely save parameters and secrets which are easily accessible by any other application component.
AWS Workspaces are used to provide developers with ready-to-use workstation that allows access to needed resources residing securely in the private network.
AWS SSO is used to easily manage user access permissions for any required resources following principle of least privilege from central location.
To make data transformations fast, reliable, and easy to update iOlap leveraged DBT (Data Build Tool). The data warehouse has 4 main layers:
Front Burner AWS infrastructure supports high volumes of data from a variety of data sources. The solution provides higher insight into Front Burners data because of the high availability, and it is stored in a unique central location. Furthermore, the solution has improved security and performance with optimized cost.
Using the above mentioned solution, we were able to achieve the following: