Travel firm improves scalability, performance and app deployment with Google Cloud
Travix is one of the world’s biggest online travel companies for airline tickets, with a range of different websites, operations in 39 countries and offices in locations including the Netherlands, UK, USA, Australia and India.
Previously, to meet spikes in seasonal traffic the company would invest in hardware, which then often went unused when normal workloads resumed. In order to reduce this unnecessary expense and harness greater scalability, infrastructure visibility and performance, Travix migrated to Google Cloud Platform.
With GCP, Google Kubernetes Engine is a key part of Travix’s platform, providing it with containerization resources and a range of features. The company also uses BigQuery, Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Dataflow for services such as data warehousing.
Travix’s Principal Technical Architect Jorrit Salverda says: "Google Cloud Platform makes our development teams more self-supported when running applications. Whenever we previously had a new application, we needed someone from operations to pick which servers it would best run on and then configure it. That's a thing of the past because our developers can now directly pull up resources as needed and lead their own development."
The company also began leveraging GCP to run its workloads, allowing for benefits such as autoscaling. Salverda says that, with GCP, “we found we were suddenly better prepared. Everything went well, as we didn't have to deal with obstacles such as manually managing scaling across zones and we were not stressed about whether we had enough resources to avoid downtime."
The support GCP provides for Travix's workloads has enabled the company to essentially transition its whole platform without the need to invest in deconstructing and rebuilding resources, resulting in a greater level of control over the platform.
Meanwhile, autoscaling and other solutions enable the company to better understand costs, allowing it to calibrate spending based on actual need and delivering cost savings. Finally, Travis is also benefitting from Google Cloud Professional Services’ tailored support, with Google staff assisting the company with tasks including troubleshooting issues and bug incident reports.
