Technology
FoodDays Technology - What does it take?
Q: What's the difference between Tuesday afternoon and Sunday night? A: Sunday night is when we remember to order!
There are two overarching goals for the technology behind FoodDays - performance and price. The thing is, both have to win, it's not a battle.
FoodDays operates at the thinest end of the price spectrum. Our goal is to help schools and PTOs provide better-than-best lunches to our children as well as make a little in fundraising efforts too. Charging a premium for that isnt compatible with their goals.
FoodDays allows busy parents to place orders at any time of the day or night - really 1am is not quiet - and without ever slowing down. Waiting to place orders is not compatible with the needs of the parents.
FoodDays has evolved from tape-and-glue to a modern serverless self-managing infrastructure to meet both of those goals. We've always been ahead of the technology curve.
History
FoodDays Technology - 2003 - 2024
- 2003 Version 1 - Homebrew
The first version of FoodDays was created as a single page app - fashionable now! It included a simple database and offered the most basic of ordering options but, it worked and, hosted on a computer in my basement, it was better than paper slips.
- 2006 New Home - Datacenter
With more features coming along and power in the outer suburbs not being that great and too many late nights cranking up the generator before the batteries went flat began to tire. In 2006 we moved the operation to our first co-location datacenter in the indestructible, undisclosed, secret cable station location on the east coast of New Jersey. Here we had power and networking because, well, if FoodDays had gone down, so would a large portion of the US Internet.
- 2010 Data Center 2 - Virtualized
As we grew, we needed to off-load the support for the hardware and found ourselves moving to one of the carrier hotels in New York City. Here we had our first taste of virtualization and 100% uptime servers but we still had to manage it ourselves. We did take this opportunity to transition from a traditional database to a more scalable solution from MongoDB.
- 2013 Cloud
As we continued to grow, we migrated to a fully managed technology solution at Amazon Web Services. Here we had access to scalable servers and 100% availability.
- 2018 Serverless
Starting in 2018 we began to migrate to a fully server-less solution.
In today's cloud computing environment services such as compute and database are available in unlimited quantities. We no longer have to run a big server 24/7 just in case a lot of people need it, today we can scale up and down from the power of an iPhone to the that of a datacenter as demand calls for it.
We no longer have to think about servers and disks as these are now commodity items, and the best part? The cost has been cut and cut to allow us to meet all of out goals for performance and low price.
- 2023 Blazor Client
In 2023 we redesigned the client experience to bring it up to date.
Using Native Compiled Web Assembly (WASM), we elevated the parents experience to that of a native app in a web browser.
At the same time we were able to shut down servers that needed to run 24x7 just in case someone needed to place an order.
- 2024 Blazor Administrator
With such benefits being realized on the client by using native compiled code in the browser, we were able to do the same for our administrators.
Shutting down more servers has halved our system costs, which we can pass on to the parents and administrators that use the service plus, the reduced environmental impact leaves us all feeling better about the cloud.
