Finally…a real hybrid multi-cloud success story
When was cloud computing invented? This is a hotly disputed subject amongst my fellow geeks, with the answers brokered spanning from 1963 through to 1993 – and across those three decades the years that have the strongest backing are 1983 and 1989 (I´m a 1983 guy).
As we charge through the 21st century the discussion has moved on to become ´who has genuinely deployed a practical cost conscious cloud strategy? ´, accompanied by similarly high levels of debate.
Like so many other businesses our cloud journey at Hotelbeds has been made up of an initial technical push with a single cloud provider tightly coupled – and deliberately so – with our legacy on-premise infrastructure.
Unfortunately this is not economical in the long-term. In the short term it works, but then the costs grow and the single partner route takes a big bite out of the advantages of a distributed architecture.
The credible cloud provider landscape has really matured in recent years and the challenge for us now is not which providers to go with, but instead how we effectively deploy our services amongst those providers.
We have accelerated our outcomes through our partnership with Rancher, the software stack that enables businesses to deliver Kubernetes-as-a-service.
I can proudly confirm that this summer we started running Kubernetes clusters in our production environments on GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and AWS (Amazon Web Services), using Rancher to deploy and distribute our work loads.
So what does this mean for our 180,000 hotel and 60,000 B2B travel buyer partners? The greater flexibility we now have means we can offer a more reliable, more robust, and more performant availability service. These are core components in our customer experience and in transaction terms this heaviest platform element.
Meanwhile an added bonus for us is the time reduction of 90% in cloud migration and 80% in deployment. This allows us to scale and deploy our workloads in minutes – literally – that in turn delivers a substantial operating efficiency and the all-important greater surety of service.
Whilst multi-cloud is far from a new strategy for us or our sector, I´d like to make clear that this is not just some theoretical exercise: we have fully deployed a multi-cluster, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud/on premise architecture to give us complete flexibility. It is an enormous achievement.
This outstanding work reflects the professionalism and commitment to innovation of our colleagues, who did all this work long before I arrived – while I bask in the glory of their hard work!
I am already working with the teams on the next phase of our cloud journey with additional core components in our platform, and also leaning on some amazing new business service technology that will enable seamless real-time performance optimization…more on that soon.
If you would like to know more about our cloud journey or the Hotelbeds product and technology community please reach out to us.
Want to find out more about how our Rancher partnership can benefit your business? Read the full case study on Rancher’s website here.
