The CloudBees Platform as a Service Enables Online Travel Agency to Cut Maintenance Time, Scale Up Server Management to Accommodate Seasonal Swings in Business
WOBURN, MA. - June 11, 2013 - CloudBees, Inc. , the Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) innovation leader, today announced that Universal Places, an online travel agency that serves 9,000 seaside and countryside destinations in Spain and Portugal, has used CloudBees technology to reduce infrastructure maintenance time by 80 percent and scale its server capacity as needed to manage wide swings in seasonal demand.
Overall, implementing the CloudBees PaaS helped Universal Places cut the time it spent weekly on non-development tasks and IT infrastructure from 16 hours to about 30 minutes. This has enabled software developers to focus more time on improving web applications and efficiently managing the agency's business.
The support CloudBees provided for simple configuration, rapid deployment and easy scaling also allowed Universal Places to better manage seasonal ebbs and flows in agency bookings. CloudBees' ability to scale enables Universal Places to accommodate server demands that can fluctuate by a factor of 10 from month to month, with business shifting dramatically to the seaside hotels portal from April through September, and to the B&B countryside portal from October through May.
"With CloudBees we have shortened time to market because we are spending 80 percent less time resolving infrastructure issues," says Juan Rodriguez Feria, CTO, Universal Places and lead architect of the company's Internet platform. "The CloudBees Platform automatically scales, so we always have enough servers to meet traffic demands in the high season, but we're not paying for servers when we don't need them in the low season. Never has it been easier to manage a Java IT infrastructure and deploy to production."
Universal Places initially hosted the travel portals on a traditional infrastructure that it set up in-house. It rapidly outgrew this setup and migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS). After evaluating several PaaS solutions, the Universal Places development team selected the CloudBees runtime services based on ease of use, configurability, an extensive partner ecosystem and one-click deployment and rollback.
From the start, the CloudBees Platform fit well with the team's agile methodology for rapid development and continuous delivery of Java applications with Grails. "We installed the CloudBees Grails plugin, configured some parameters and the database, and in minutes we had our first app running on CloudBees," Feria said.
The team's previous deployment process required numerous manual steps, including uploading of the WAR file via FTP, backing up databases, starting and stopping application servers and redirecting web servers. Reverting to a previous version of the app was equally arduous. With the CloudBees Platform, the process has been greatly streamlined - with the database backups and requests to deploy each done in just one click.
The development team has plans in place to incorporate continuous integration (CI) into its development process using the CloudBees development services, powered by Jenkins.
"The economy in recent years has been challenging for the travel industry. Leisure properties face stiffer competition than ever connecting with travelers and converting them to sales," said Steven G. Harris, senior vice president of products, CloudBees. "They need an IT infrastructure to facilitate opportunities - not hold their businesses back. Universal Places has made incredible strides, using the CloudBees platform to become more efficient, scalable and productive. We look forward to working with the Universal Places development team on additional Continuous Cloud Delivery initiatives to drive further improvements in the business."
Additional Resources
Learn more about the CloudBees Platform: https://cloudbees.com/faq-customers-runcloud
Read the Universal Places case study: https://cloudbees.com/customers
About CloudBees
CloudBees (cloudbees.com ) provides a Java Platform as a Service that enables Continuous Cloud Delivery, accelerating the development and deployment of web and mobile applications. With Continuous Cloud Delivery, development teams can quickly deploy applications and make frequent incremental updates to them. By eliminating the friction caused by provisioning, maintaining and administering complex hardware and software infrastructure, CloudBees allows developers to do what they do best: develop cool applications. The CloudBees Platform provides a set of services, instantly activated with a click, that allow developers to rapidly build and run new business applications with zero IT administrative overhead. CloudBees serves the needs of a wide range of businesses from small startups that need to quickly create new on-line businesses, to large IT organizations that need to rapidly respond to dynamic market opportunities. Follow CloudBees on Twitter (@CloudBees) and on Facebook. You can also try CloudBees for free .
Backed by Matrix Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, CloudBees was founded in 2010 by former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey and an elite team of middleware and open source technology professionals.
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