Rackspace has supported the migration of loveholidays, the UK’s fastest growing online travel agency, to Google Cloud Platform in under six months. By designing a scalable base on Google Cloud, the new infrastructure now allows loveholidays to handle 7-fold more partner traffic.
In an industry where customer experience is paramount, loveholidays has built a competitive edge in sophisticated search and filter features that keep users engaged and guided along a well-designed path. Rackspace helped loveholidays design and implement a solution that allows it to build on this value proposition, accelerating the development of new features.
By moving to Google Cloud, loveholidays is able to run up to 50 unique development environments at any one time. In the span of five months, the team deployed the same number of development environments as it did in a two-year period prior to migrating. This has reduced the time to market for features such as its new international index search capability.
On top of a solid foundation to support product development, loveholidays needed infrastructure that could scale around fluctuating traffic. The January and February holiday sales are a big seasonal moment for the site, and the company’s infrastructure needs to navigate that scale of request, as well as being able to scale down during quieter periods.
Since the move to Google Cloud, loveholidays can manage a span of between half and five times its previous peak capacity. This ability to scale up and down with demand means the team can use capacity where it’s needed to speed up the delivery of certain capabilities.
Jesse McLaughlin, Chief Technology Officer at loveholidays said:
“Our infrastructure team previously had to devote most of their time to fixing issues, but with Google Cloud, these team members are freed up to support the business in other ways. We’ve been able to leverage them in development, which has boosted our ability to release new functionality.”
“We’re a very technical team, but we can’t start from zero. Rackspace was instrumental in bootstrapping a process that we could run with – it’s a true partnership. The architecture and design are still paying off dividends.”
Nick Henry, General Manager, Managed Public Cloud, EMEA at Rackspace said:
“Our unbiased expertise and deep platform knowledge means we can accelerate the value of the cloud for customers. For loveholidays, this meant designing a scalable base to drive their business forward and supporting a team under time pressure with our specialist expertise in Google Cloud.”
Olaf Akkerman, VP EMEA at Rackspace said:
“Our promise to provide Fanatical Experience means we work hard to understand each of our customers’ unique business needs and ambitions before we design a solution suited and tailored to them. With loveholidays we learned that technology is at the heart of their business with its relentless focus on constant product development to meet customer needs. We’re incredibly proud to have helped architect a platform that allows them to further establish their value proposition.”
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