How TUI increased their infrastructure
performance by 150%

TUI POLAND CASE STUDY

Stability of operation regardless of the workload, no need to hire additional administrators, no need to invest in hardware and significant savings – these are just some of the benefits that TUI gained from Oktawave cloud migration.

TUI is a company operating in the Polish tourism market for over 20 years. During this time, almost 1.5 million customers used the services of this travel agency. Over the last ten years, the development of the Internet and the increase in the computers and mobile devices availability completely changed the way of searching for holiday offers. You can now search for the dream vacations in your browser, which means that the service provider must have an IT infrastructure that will cope with high traffic on its website.

What's more, the TUI infrastructure is used not only to support the website or the booking system – it is also a backend for almost 400 of the company's employees who make sure that the holidays with TUI meet the expectations. This means that the company has always needed corporate stability and performance provided by advanced IT technologies.

CHALLENGE

The development of the online portal and the increase in the number of transactions made the existing infrastructure insufficient. The industry in which TUI operates is characterized by particular seasonality, therefore the use of the infrastructure has changed a lot over time.

The infrastructure was used most intensively in November, December, January, February, and then in June, July, August, and September.

The existing TUI infrastructure was based on dedicated servers, a solution that does not favor seasonal changes, especially for companies that grow their customer base every year.

It is difficult to predict the demand for resources and it usually ends up being overestimated or underestimated and adding more dedicated servers on short notice.

In other words, the existing solution was not scalable because it was not able to respond to changing traffic. Therefore, the capacity of the purchased machines was either not enough or too much.

That generated high maintenance costs and was inconvenient to manage: it required additional servers and changes to the application codebase.

Instead of buying another dedicated server, TUI decided to solve the problem once and for all by migrating to public cloud. The main goals of the cloud transformation were:

• increasing computing power,
• scalability,
• shortening the time to market,
• optimization of costs.

SOLUTION

1. Migration

After researching other cloud vendors and alternative infrastructure solutions, TUI chose Oktawave.

We chose Oktawave mainly due to the convenience and economic factors. The cloud solution offered by Oktawave eliminated the need to develop dedicated servers, incur costs of periodic modernization and infrastructure administration.

Paweł Bieńkowski, Online Sales and IT Manager

Oktawave architects and administrators kicked off the project with a meticulous migration plan. Then, they set up the testing environment. After the initial stage, our administrators set about the optimization and test deployments.

When everything worked as expected, they moved on to performance tests, and as soon as they were completed, the environment was deployed to production.

The TUI infrastructure based on the Oktawave cloud provides, most of all, scalability and flexibility – it dynamically responds to the current workload and is completely resistant to overloads. The new infrastructure eliminated the need for resource planning.

2. After migration

Currently, the company has two separate environments – testing and production. The testing environment consists of 11 OCI instances divided into the following roles:

• 2 web servers
• 2 static content servers
• 2 database servers (master/slave replication)
• 2 database servers for cache tables
• 2 servers managing database servers for cache tables
• 1 application server (CMS)

The production environment consists of 17 OCI instances divided into the following roles:

• 1 VPN server
• 4 web servers
• 2 static content servers
• 2 database servers (master/slave replication)
• 3 database servers for cache tables
• 2 servers managing database servers for cache tables
• 1 application server (CMS)
• 2 proxy servers

To make working with such a large infrastructure easier, administrators use instance containers. Oktawave Cloud Storage is being tested all the time. OCS is tested in terms of storing website content and data backup.

BUSINESS BENEFIS

TUI employees conducted a price simulation, which showed that if the company wanted to build the currently used infrastructure from scratch, its cost would've been even 40% higher. Also, the administrators are satisfied with the new infrastructure – they tested it and confirmed that it is more efficient by about 150%. TUI administrators also praise the simplification of the infrastructure.

The Oktawave cloud allows smooth adjustment of computing power to the workload. It also stays responsive to unexpected, sudden workload changes, and the autoscaler manages that on its own. With Oktawave cloud you are billed only for the resources used – it means that in periods of diminished demand for tourism services, TUI pays less for the infrastructure.

Thanks to all these benefits, the company can focus on the core of its business, which is to provide the highest quality of tourism services.

What we've heard about cloud has turned out to be true. Not only did we save on infrastructure but also increased its efficiency. We are now sure that any increase in traffic on our websites will not affect the comfort of searching for your dream vacation with us.

Paweł Bieńkowski, Online Sales and IT Manager