iFood scales real-time data securely and efficiently

As one of Latin America’s largest digital platforms, iFood relies on real-time data to support millions of transactions and customer interactions every day. As the business expanded, the company needed to scale its real-time operations while maintaining efficiency, reliability and cost control.

Its growing event-streaming environment introduced increasing operational complexity. Managing and monitoring the infrastructure required specialized expertise, creating additional operational overhead and making it more difficult to identify and address production issues quickly and cost-effectively.

To support continued growth, iFood sought an approach that would help simplify operations, improve visibility into its real-time environment and enable teams to focus more of their effort on delivering business value rather than managing underlying infrastructure.

Using IBM® Confluent® Cloud, iFood strengthened observability across its event-streaming environment while reducing the complexity associated with managing streaming infrastructure at scale. Greater visibility into the health and performance of real-time data flows helped teams identify potential issues earlier and reduce the operational burden placed on engineering resources.

Confluent also helped iFood transition from tightly coupled systems to a more resilient event-driven architecture. By connecting thousands of microservices through streaming data pipelines and providing access to specialized expertise, the company streamlined event-streaming operations while enabling engineering teams to focus more on innovation and business value rather than infrastructure management.

Confluent Cloud enabled iFood to scale real-time data availability in line with growing business needs while reducing the operational burden on platform teams. Supporting more than 60 million orders per month, the company was able to elastically scale to meet changing demand without requiring teams to manually monitor and adjust capacity.

By reducing the effort required to manage Kafka infrastructure, engineering resources were redirected toward more strategic projects and higher-value initiatives. Fully managed capabilities helped developers focus on business logic and application needs rather than maintaining underlying streaming infrastructure.

As Confluent’s role expanded across the organization, supporting approximately 2,000 microservices and 700 applications, iFood lowered the total cost of ownership by reducing infrastructure demands, operational overhead and the engineering resources required to support mission-critical streaming workloads at scale.

For more than 10 years, iFood has focused on meal delivery, serving more than 60 million orders every month across more than 1,200 cities in Brazil. Through its digital platform, the company connects consumers, restaurants and delivery services while pursuing its vision of creating more intelligent, efficient and convenient ways to bring food to customers.