Snoonu aims to become Qatar’s first unicorn. Microsoft Azure has been supporting them to achieve that goal

Snoonu, an online app and delivery service, has been satiating cravings across Qatar since it was founded in 2019. Leveraging their initial success, Snoonu transformed itself into a QCommerce platform. Using their mobile app, which offers everything, from food & grocery delivery to health & beauty to an online shop, Snoonu is becoming a Qatari super app. 

“Snoonu is not in the business of e-commerce, but Q-commerce,” states Waseem Ahmed, Chief Technical Officer. 

The changing face of online business.

E-commerce has always been about better pricing, but today customers expect shorter delivery times, and are even willing to pay a premium for it. This has driven the change from E-commerce to Quick Commerce. 

Just a few years ago, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning were the domain of high-tech companies; however, the emergence of cloud technologies, especially Azure with Azure ML, has enabled even small start-ups to offer AI/ML based services at a fraction of the cost. This too has disrupted the way online businesses operate today.

Snoonu see this as an opportunity; they have been aggressively working to cut their delivery time from 30 minutes to 20 minutes. Snoonu is also focused on reducing the error rate in terms of deliveries made and are ensuring that 99% of all deliveries are made within the promised delivery time. 

Growing faster than expectations is good but also challenging.

Snoonu’s unbridled growth didn’t naturally mean an increase in profitability. It faced enormous challenges in terms of scalability.  

Waseem Ahmed said, “We noticed that every time the orders went up, so did our cost. It was impossible to manage CPU to ensure availability for applications and our database. This led to a lot of downtime since our database consumed 99% of our CPU bandwidth, which meant the applications simply could not perform.”

Soon, Snoonu found themselves spending vital DevOps resources to manage their VM, database backup, and other infrastructural tasks, which meant their key business responsibilities didn’t get the attention they deserved.

Getting ahead of the curve with Microsoft Azure.

Snoonu was forced to look for new scalable solutions. They chose Microsoft Azure for the sheer benefits it offered – availability of technical resources in the region, native support for the DotNet platform, ease of managing services, cost savings, lower network latency…the list goes on.

Waseem Ahmed said, “We re-architected our solution to base it upon microservices, so that each microservice can be deployed as an independent application using containerization technology. Intercommunication between services is handled by a message bus. With these changes, we deployed our solution on Azure as PaaS solutions.” 

Snoonu began using Database as a service, Azure Kubernetes services for container deployment, Azure API Gateway for request interception, Azure Cache for Redis, and Azure message bus as its messaging backbone. 

“In a very short span of time, we witnessed a dramatic increase in systems availability, we were able to scale our services elastically, and productivity increased as our tech team is now able to focus on our actual business problems,” stated Waseem Ahmed.

This scalability has brought down operating costs and resulted in simpler tech operations and DevOps. That apart, with Kubernetes and Azure load balancers, Snoonu’s system can withstand any major failure as it enabled them to easily replicate their data across different zones.

Waseem Ahmed said, “While the migration to Azure was smooth, Microsoft ensured a hassle-free journey for us with their support. They assigned a solution architect who has been working with us since the very beginning.”

A quick turnaround in reliability and scalability of the systems.

Today, Snoonu’s developers are focusing more time on business domain issues, which has increased productivity, reliability, and scalability. 

When asked about employee feedback, Waseem Ahmad replied, “So far, the feedback from the tech team has been very positive. Both ERP and Fleet Management are working and stable on Azure.” He also stated that Snoonu’s objective is to become the fastest delivery company in the region, not only in terms of food delivery but also in terms of building innovative solutions, and the migration to Microsoft Azure is allowing them to finally focus on that goal. 

Where Snoonu aims to go from here.

Snoonu has adopted a three-tiered plan. One, it aims to constantly innovate and enhance customer experiences. Two, it plans to expand into other services such as FalconFlex, (Snoonu’s SaaS model for last mile delivery) and build its own categories just as it did with Snoomart and Snooflower. Three, its ultimate goal is to spread its wings and enter different countries in the region. 

Waseem Ahmed said, “These strategic objectives point towards our end goal of becoming the first Qatari Super App and Qatar’s first local Unicorn.”