Hi guys,

let’s start with first Episode of “Tricks using Cloud” where I show you how you can using cloud with a low cost budget for daily needs.

Small part of restaurants always used digital menu, but most of them still tied to paper menu. Specially after COVID-19, this behaviour is changed, and to avoid paper menu being passed hand to hand and increase infections, restaurant owner started to digitalize their menu, and clients can now scan a QR code with own smartphone.

In this first Episode I show you how we can get a QR code menu for your restaurant with few monthly dollars.

We use in this case Amazon Web Services as Cloud Provider and it is very simple. First of all, we need to sign-up a new account following this link: https://signin.aws.amazon.com/signup?request_type=register and register a payment method under Billing and Cost Management under section Payment Preferences (https://us-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home#/paymentpreferences/paymentmethods):

Once you fill all informations like credit card number, expiration, owner, billing address, etc… you can start to use AWS Services.

For this purpose we use an S3 bucket – that is a object storage secure and scalable – to upload our PDF menu. To do this, go to search bar on top and type S3

On next page just click on Create bucket

In the following page type bucket name enable ACLs and make all objects public.

Keep other sections AS-IS.

Please note that bucket name is unique all over the world; I always suggest choosing a name starting with your company name, or in this case restaurant name.

At this point we can create our S3 bucket:

Let’s click on our bucket and finally we can upload our pdf file menu.

Search in dialog box our file and click open.

When upload succeeded, click Close

Now we have our file on objects list and now we can make our file public:

Once public, we can view the file properties just clicking on its and note the public url:

When you upload a new version of menu, if you don’t want the link to change, keep the same file name, new file replace the existing one, and everytime, you need to make new file public from Action Menu.

This URL is already usable – for example you can refer URL in your restaurant website – and if you click on it, we can see our menu on a new browser tab:

https://valerioagosto-restaurant-menu.s3.eu-south-1.amazonaws.com/myrestaurant-menu-dinner.pdf

Amazon creates a subdomain link under amazonaws.com domain with bucket name and bucket region; amazonaws.com domain use HTTP(S) protocol and domain is signed from Amazon (that is a Trusted Certification Authority) so connections are secure and encrypted with SSL.

Last step is convert this link in a QR code. To do this there are many QR code generator if you search on Google but if you use Bing, it has a generator embeded on search engine if you type for “qr code generator”. Just past our link on textbox and you can copy, or save QR code as PNG or SVG format.

Now I copy here the code so you can try to scan with your mobile phone:

Well, we arrived to the end and now you can print this QR and attach to your tables.

Hope this First episode was helpful.

That’s all folks !