PinMe is the company behind a growing e-restaurant solution in Hong Kong. With the PinMe system installed, restaurant goers can order dishes from the convenience of their smart phones simply by scanning a QR code. Designed with the local food culture in mind, restaurant owners can easily build their own menus and have a variety of food customization options available in app, so that customers have all the choices they want right at their fingertips. Besides e-menus, PinMe also provides restaurants with a robust system of e-processing management, operation reports and analysis, making for an all-in-one POS and CRM system. Already more than 100 restaurants in Hong Kong have started using PinMe to digitalize their existing systems and reduce overall running expenses.

As a growing e-restaurant system gaining popularity in Hong Kong, PinMe required a reliable and highly capable cloud infrastructure to power its services as the company further expands its business. For one, the company required a higher level of computing capabilities to make sure that PinMe’s in-app experience could remain flawless and with low loading times even as business expands. Also involved with this are PinMe’s requirements for a cloud solution that brings a higher level of scalability and support for high concurrency scenarios, so that its e-restaurant systems, in particular the Scan-to-Order system, can withstand the large traffic spikes seen during lunch hours. In summary, PinMe required a cloud solution that could bring the necessary computing capabilities needed to ensure the reliability of their online systems as business grows.

Alibaba Cloud was a clear choice for PinMe. Alibaba Cloud is the number one cloud service provider in Asia and has a mature portfolio of infrastructure-as-a-service products with several powerful and high configurable feature sets. Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) servers and database products like ApsaraDB for RDS come with automatic backup mechanisms, offer a high level of security, and can be used together with the various monitoring and alarm services of Alibaba Cloud CloudMonitor. All of this makes for a cloud infrastructure that is highly secure and reliable, which was a major selling point for PinMe, with system stability and reliability being PinMe’s top priority to its customers, who depend on PinMe services day and night and during high-traffic lunch and dinner hours.

Through migrating its underlying IT infrastructure to the cloud, PinMe has built a cloud architecture using several of Alibaba Cloud’s products and services. The architecture uses a combination of Elastic Compute Service and ApsaraDB for RDS to host PinMe’s business critical systems. Together, these two products have enhanced the stability of PinMe’s online services. Both of the products come with automatic backup mechanisms, offer a high level of security and scalability, and can be used together with the various monitoring and alarm services of Alibaba Cloud CloudMonitor. PinMe uses both within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to provider a greater level of network isolation. Next, Alibaba Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN), together with Elastic IP (EIP), was used to improve access speeds to PinMe’s website services and applications.

The newly deployed cloud service infrastructure has allowed PinMe to be able to focus on the development of its application and web services. As business continues to grow, PinMe will continue to implement more networking, database, and security solutions from Alibaba Cloud. In particular, as the scale of PinMe’s business continues to rise, PinMe intends to integrate Alibaba Cloud Sever Load Balancer (SLB) into its systems for concurrent processing and greater fault tolerance, as well as key-value database services such as ApsaraDB for Redis or ApsaraDB for Memcache. Other solutions discussed are using independent message queue services and message push services to improve system message processing capabilities and using cloud firewall and risk identification services to improve system security and reliability.

Notice: ApsaraDB for Redis and Tair have been merged and renamed to Tair (Redis® OSS-compatible) since September 2024.