Reinventing travel with an inventive technology platform

By Alejandro Alvarez Vazquez and Alyssa Tong

Solution: Avoris Travel, a unique travel company seeking to reinvent the travel industry, relies on an equally inventive technology platform fueled by Jenkins.

Challenge: With over 200 developers relying on the company’s infrastructure, they needed a secure, easily customizable, and powerful CI/CD platform.

Results:

• reduced build times over 50% with the flexibility of Jenkins plugins

• increased the speed of delivery with Jenkins Pipelines

• much less problematic and simple deployments for the team

• scalable infrastructure supporting 675 agencies and over 2.8 million international consumers

Speed matters when your mission is to reinvent the travel business: for your agents, your customers, and, especially, your technology team. That’s the case for Ávoris Travel, part of Barceló Group, which boasts an extensive network of almost 675 travel agencies across Spain and Portugal. The company provides unique brand holidays, leisure and business travel and offers reviews and advice on hotels, flight deals and tickets, cruise deals, and rental car services to more than 1.5 million international travelers.

With distinguished destination travel brands like LeSki, Le Musik, and a selection of author travels under its "Viagens Com Assinatura" signature travel concept, a proprietary database is the ticket to securing inventive travel opportunities. From their corporate travel agency, BCD Travel, which supports more than 4,000 clients to their Rhodasol & BedToYou brand which features a bank of hotel beds open to all agencies with more than 100,000 establishments, a smart dynamic booking engine is essential.

And all of these brands (plus more!) are powered by a nimble, progressive technology team. Not only do their developers and engineers need to support all of the various front-end applications relied on by their agents, their backend services need to maintain and enhance an unparalleled search database to power this innovative operation. Unique to Avoris is a discreet machining technology which enables agents to enter specific criteria to search and find all types of trips and travel opportunities across the entire network.

Because of this, the technologists at Avoris need to constantly innovate to support Avoris global brands, agents, and more. To power accelerated development activities, all of those divisions are supported by a CI/CD platform built on Jenkins.

A fast, simple CI/CD matters when your technology is the driver for a new kind of travel company

"Our infrastructure is very important because we have to be online to meet customer demand anywhere in the world," said Alejandro Alvarez Vazquez, Sysadmin, Avoris Travel.  "Our CI/CD platform is used by 200 people. The services that we build and deploy are used by thousands of potential clients and by our network of 675 own agencies located in Spain and Portugal."

As noted, Avoris engineers have created their own search and booking engines fueled by a proprietary business rules engine. As their developers innovate these technologies, having a solid CI/CD that lets them work at an accelerated pace is critical.

"Our developers are grouped in numerous small teams. Because most of our software is based on a microservices architecture, new deployments are made to the production environment every week," Alejandro continued. "Thanks to Jenkins we are making these deployments much easier but not more often. The frequency is the same but as in the past but now it is much less problematic and simple."

"With a focus on building cutting edge technology services, we turned to Jenkins because it is easily customizable and scales with our evolving needs," Alejandro said.  "Internal applications and transversal services developed by the architecture team to support common functionalities to the rest of the applications: logging, cache, app configuration, apis, etc. All Of which are supported by their evolving platform.

A use case for acceleration while reducing build times by more than half

Process improvement is top of mind for the ops team at Avoris. And Alejandro shared his story for one critical instance where the use of Jenkins made a big difference. They realized their build times were on the decline, so they sought to minimize their delivery cycle times with Jenkins. The results? The team was able to speed up their CI/CD with shared volumes and more. And they were able to reduce build times more than 50%.

"This specific project was successful due to the vast number of Jenkins plugins available, the extensibility of Jenkinsfiles with the use of Groovy, and many integration possibilities," Alejandro explained. "Additionally, we relied on a large and helpful Jenkins community and all the Jenkins resources available to us."

The tech team is also diligent about monitoring performance: "We have a comparison of build times after making major improvements to our Jenkins Pipelines CI/CDs," Alejandro notes. "By using openshift 4 low compute nodes and shared container storage after migration from Docker to Buildah, a more than remarkable reduction in construction times has been achieved."

The reductions times included: an improvement from 45 seconds to just 8 seconds for small applications, shaving larger legacy apps by 7-8 minutes, and reducing final image generation time by 10-30 seconds

Simply put, Alejandro said: "Jenkins enables us to do things simply, quickly and in a powerful way."

The team will continue to enhance their platform with ease because Jenkins offers a" huge number of integration possibilities," which enables them to make adjustments on the fly. And this team will continue to reinvent their technology - with the help of Jenkins - to support Avoris' mission to reinvent the travel industry.