Case Study: Tapingo achieves real-time, scalable campus ordering with Amazon Web Services

Tapingo - Customer Case Study

Tapingo is a mobile ordering app that lets college students order food and beverages from local campus merchants; it operates across US and Israeli campuses and handles intense bursts of demand (about 75 orders per minute at peak). The company wrestled with real‑time inventory and queuing problems—long latencies (up to 50 seconds), costly, overcomplicated infrastructure, and an outage that showed it needed a stable, always‑on system to keep orders, inventory and pickups synchronized.

Tapingo simplified and rebuilt its architecture on Amazon Web Services, relaunching in a day and using EC2, MongoDB, Amazon Redshift, SQS, ElastiCache, Route 53 and CloudWatch to handle communication, queuing, caching, analytics and monitoring. The move cut latency from 50 seconds to about 30 milliseconds, enabled international expansion, allowed predictive stocking (about 30% of orders predicted daily), reduced operational costs and complexity, and helped the company quintuple its user base while scaling quickly.

Tapingo

Udi Oster

CTO and Vice President of Research & Development