Expedia Benefits using AWS Cloud

What is AWS Cloud ??

Well , Amazon web service (AWS) is a platform that offers flexible, reliable, scalable, easy-to-use and cost-effective cloud computing solutions. AWS is a comprehensive, easy to use computing platform offered by Amazon.

Did You Know?

For many different organizations, the use of AWS is evidently widespread. But it’s not just interesting to see companies of varying industries implementing Amazon’s cloud tools. They’re also using it for different use cases, whether it’s mitigating cyber security threats or developing faster websites. The opportunity here is huge.

Here are some interesting statistics about the how AWS cloud platform is becoming successful in providing vast number of services to it’s clients in a more efficient way.

Revenue : Since launching in 2006, AWS has expanded exponentially, with Statistica stating that net sales were $25.5 billion in 2019; a significant growth compared to the $17.5 billion it made a year before.

Users: Of course, AWS wouldn’t be able to achieve such impressive revenues if it weren’t for a growing customer base. AWS claims to serve “millions of customers”, which include “fastest-growing startups, largest enterprise and leading government agencies”. In 2016, ArsTechnica reported that AWS had more than a million users. Developers are an important demographic for AWS. According to Statistica, 26.6% of software developers used AWS services last year. Meanwhile, 19% of connected devices ran on AWS in 2019.

Services, Regions and Partners : When it comes to the product itself, AWS currently provides “175 featured services from data centers globally”. The firm operates data centers across the US, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, the UK, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden and Brazil, as well as one exclusive region for the US Government and two regions for Chinese customers. AWS also operates a large partner network, which is comprised of over 8,000 businesses that can help customers implement and build applications on the platform.

Market Share : Clearly, AWS has achieved some big milestones in recent years. But what other statistics should you know? Figures from Statistica show that AWS currently has a market share of 47.8% in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service sector, along with a share of 25.2% in the Platform-as-a-Service arena.

Why EXPEDIA wants a cloud platform ???

Expedia Group is committed to continuous innovation, technology, and platform improvements to create a great experience for its customers. The Expedia Worldwide Engineering (EWE) organization supports all websites under the Expedia Group brand. Expedia Group began using Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2010 to launch Expedia Suggest Service (ESS), a typeahead suggestion service that helps customers enter travel, search, and location information correctly. According to the company’s metrics, an error page is the main reason for site abandonment. Expedia Group wanted global users to find what they were looking for quickly and without errors. At the time, Expedia Group operated all its services from data centers in Chandler, AZ. The engineering team realized that they had to run ESS in locations physically close to customers to enable a quick and responsive service with minimal network latency.

Why Amazon Web Services ??

Expedia Group considered on-premises virtualization solutions as well as other cloud providers, but ultimately chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) because it was the only solution with the global infrastructure in place to support Asia Pacific customers. “From an architectural perspective, infrastructure, automation, and proximity to the customer were key factors,” explains Murari Gopalan, Technology Director. “There was no way for us to solve the problem without AWS.”

HOW EXPEDIA IS GETTING BENEFITED ??

By 2011, Expedia Group was running several critical, high-volumes applications on AWS, such as the Global Deals Engine (GDE). GDE delivers deals to its online partners and allows them to create custom websites and applications using Expedia Group APIs and product inventory tools.

Expedia Group provisions Hadoop clusters using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (Amazon EMR) to analyze and process streams of data coming from Expedia Group’s global network of websites, primarily clickstream, user interaction, and supply data, which is stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Expedia Group processes approximately 240 requests per second. “The advantage of AWS is that we can use Auto Scaling to match load demand instead of having to maintain capacity for peak load in traditional datacenters,” comments Gopalan. Expedia Group uses AWS CloudFormation with Chef to deploy its entire front and backend stack into its Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) environment. Expedia Group uses a multi-region, multi-availability zone architecture with a proprietary DNS service to add resiliency to the applications.

What’s the future of EXPEDIA in AWS ???

Expedia Group is all in on AWS, with plans to migrate 80 percent of its mission-critical apps from its on-premises data centers to the cloud in the next two to three years. By using AWS, Expedia Group has become more resilient. Expedia Group’s developers have been able to innovate faster while saving the company millions of dollars. Expedia Group provides travel-booking services across its flagship site Expedia.com and about 200 other travel-booking sites around the world.