Incorporating Additional Technology

Looking forward beyond the MVP, the team is thinking about leveraging a Platform as a Service public cloud tool such Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host the website as well as the infrastructure. AWS is the world’s leading cloud provider and as such, has the capacity to host the PetLovers website if traffic increases exponentially. Building an MVP is often a challenge for any new enterprise, but one of the hardest engineering and ultimately business problems is how do you take a prototype and scale it out to production. The team needs to think about scaling not only the technology, but also the operations and the supply chain. There needs to be processes in place to deal with not only the web component, but also the supply chain. Will talk about the technology first and then the supply chain second.

For the technical side, the team has to think about deploying features and hotfixes with automation in mind. Code and the new features that are developed have to be tested and deployed to production automatically with humans out-of-the-loop as much as possible. This way, this frees up time for the engineers to fix infrastructure issues and not get bogged down by ad-hoc requests to fix things on the fly. The team should ideally think about some kind of autoscaling of infrastructure, deployments using a Docker-based platform and orchestrated by a tool such as Kubernetes and using a lambda function backend that’s serverless and let AWS handle the scaling on the backend.

For the supply chain, the team is considering buying a warehouse and additional hardware infrastructure and transportation vehicles to house all the supplies and sort out the products. This is assuming there is more than anticipated growth, otherwise the time and money could be spent better on other pressing needs of the company. This is a logistics, supply chain and general inventory management problem that also needs to be thought about carefully. The team has to use software tools to track inventory, log worker hours, and track expenses; one software tool that the team is considering is Intuit Quickbook. Inventory should be ordered from suppliers in bulk, but only at the right times when we know it’s likely to sell out. For these reasons, customer analytics is so important to understand what’s really going on. The team will be using Python, R, and Tableau and other tools to dig into the data and really understand customer trends and how best to stock inventory in order to meet customer demands.

Reference:

- https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/

- https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/

- https://kubernetes.io/