Travel site cuts infrastructure costs with Google Cloud
Routard.com is a website providing information, tips and travel booking services for French-speaking travellers and is the online counterpart to the trusted Le Routard series of guidebooks. In addition to its numerous guide services, the site also hosts a growing community of travellers, enabling them to share photos and experiences.
CTO Philippe Boblet says: “We are the number one Francophone editorial travel website, with an average of seven million unique visitors every month. These days, users want to share their experiences, and they also want information and booking options in as few clicks as possible. The market is changing rapidly, with new editorial content appearing from travel bloggers and ecommerce travel sites, so we have to constantly evolve to keep our readers interested.”
However, the business struggled to implement changes to its site quickly and effectively and, as a result, opted to move from an on-premises infrastructure to a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) solution in order to gain flexibility and speed up its deployment.
Under its previous ticketed ITIL incident management system, Routard.com would regularly take hours to respond to issues and had little oversight. With its GCP migration, it has moved to virtual machines on Compute Engine, taking advantage of services such as Cloud Load Balancing, while improving monitoring and backup practices with Cloud Storage and Stackdriver Logging.
Boblet said: “Since moving to Compute Engine, we can monitor exactly what’s happening on our infrastructure. That means we can keep track of specific metrics and make the most of the performance gains that are possible thanks to Google Cloud Platform.”
Routard.com’s GCP migration has enabled it to make cost savings of up to 60 per cent compared to with its on-premises system. More importantly, though, with almost 99.99 per cent availability, the migration has empowered the tech team to actively look at ways to improve the company’s infrastructure, rather than reacting to problems as they occur.
Looking forward, Routard.com is aiming to build a totally cloud-native infrastructure, utilising Kubernetes and managed services such as Cloud Functions and Cloud SQL.
