Hello everyone, this blog is about how India's largest organized chai retailer uses the Amazon Web Services. Being a chai person I was very excited to write this blog.

Founded in 2010, Chai Point is India’s largest organized chai retailer with about 100 retail stores, on-demand chai delivery services, and Internet of Things-enabled chai and coffee dispensers. The business also produces a line of snacks called Made-for-Chai. Chai Point has about 800 employees and locations in eight Indian cities: Bangalore, Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, and Chennai.

What is Amazon Web Services?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully-featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

So what were the challenges faced by a chai retailer?

To establish and grow a presence in a market where consumption of tea is about 15 times that of coffee, Chai Point needed a highly reliable, scalable infrastructure to run key business applications including a custom enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, a customer relationship management (CRM) system, and an inventory management system. Deploying an on-premises infrastructure was impractical because the business would have had to make investments based on unreliable growth forecasts, potentially leading to under-utilization of server capacity.

Why Amazon Web Services?

Chai Point determined that only a cloud-based service could meet its infrastructure requirements, and it considered a range of cloud-service providers before deciding to use Amazon Web Services (AWS). “The momentum AWS had established in creating and launching new services, combined with the positive feedback we received about its capabilities from our own technology team, gave us the confidence to adopt AWS,” says Singh Bijral. The business began its migration to AWS and now runs its key systems in the AWS Cloud, including its custom ERP, CRM, and inventory-management systems; its point-of-sale system is known as SHARK; centralized data aggregation and custom analytics system; and a client feedback system. Chai Point uses an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) that enables the business to isolate sensitive internal systems from the Internet and provide access to public-facing systems on the web. By late 2016, the business was exploring how to extend its use of core AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)-and potentially take advantage of the AWS IoT platform to run boxC.in. Chai Point’s confidence in using AWS to run SHARK, boxC.in, and its other key systems is supported by regular training and architecture reviews to help the business maximize the value of the AWS services it uses. “Our AWS solutions architect is in regular discussions with our internal technical team to provide pointers on how we can optimize areas such as security and scalability,” says Singh Bijral. “These pointers have been invaluable in helping our business achieve the best possible outcomes from our infrastructure investments.”

AWS services used by Chai Point

Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

Amazon RDS

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.

Benefits of AWS

• Controlled costs by investing in IT infrastructure based on demand

• Scaled to support the sale of 150,000 cups of chai daily

• Supported plans to grow its boxC.in service by at least threefold

• The business is running its key systems on AWS

So this was all about how a chai retailer uses AWS cloud services. Thank you for reading this blog and see you in the next one!

To read the full article on chai point case study: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/chai_point/?did=cr_card&trk=cr_card