INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres
loveholidays sees uplift
in partner traffic with
Rackspace and Google Cloud
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R
ackspace has supported the migration of loveholidays,
one of the UK’s fastest growing online travel agencies, to
Google Cloud Platform in under six months. By designing a
scalable base on Google Cloud, the new infrastructure now allows
loveholidays to handle seven-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 its 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 its 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 its 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 it to
further establish its value proposition.” n
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