Cloud, DevOps and NoSQL: how cutting edge tech keeps Amadeus flying high

Keeping up with changes in the travel industry means always staying ahead of the curve, says CTO Olaf Schnapauff

The Amadeus IT Group, which was originally set up by a consortium of European airlines in the ‘80s, needs to ensure it remains right at the cutting edge of technology.

The travel industry is changing rapidly with many processes being automated and streamlined. There is a multitude of independent actors involved in the process of moving millions of people around the globe (international airlines, airports, baggage handlers, customs, hire cars, transit links, agencies, hotels). This complexity and the pace of change makes Amadeus's role in providing information transferred securely, reliably, economically and in real-time a particularly challenging technical prospect.

And that's before you get to the whims of the passengers. In the past travellers used to have a fixed date and destination in mind before they investigated options, but these days queries are much more speculative, explained CTO of global operations Olaf Schnapauff, speaking of visitors to travel search sites like Kayak, one Amadeus's customers.

"Twenty five per cent of travellers have not decided on their destination and 42 per cent don't know what date they want to travel," he said.

"So the queries are a lot more open and they want responses immediately."

The volume of queries is rising too. Like many engineers, Schnapauff is keen to talk numbers.

"We serve 190 countries and we handle over 3.9 million bookings per day at peak times. That means more than 1.6 billion data requests every day. We processed 740 million passengers boarded in 2015."

Every single one of these numbers is trending upwards, asking more and more of Amadeus' technical underpinnings, partnerships and technologists.

"We're always looking for new tech to introduce new capabilities and to evolve the platform so it can deal with today's needs, which are continuously changing," explained Schnapauff.

So what are the strategies the group has in place? One is the widespread adoption of open source technologies for easier integration and customisation. Amadeus is a leading user of, and contributor to Docker, for example, as well as NoSQL databases MongoDB and Couchbase.

"We choose vendors we can integrate across," Schnapauff said. "A lot of our commercial partners provide open and open source solutions as well, and Amadeus provides an open API in the developer ecosystem because in the travel industry a lot of our customers provide solutions."

Amadeus is a global platform and so Schnapauff's focus on cloud comes as no surprise. The travel information platform is in part based on based on Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS, which the company adopted in 2015 as a basis for a hybrid cloud architecture, supporting private cloud applications for its customers and public cloud for the data layer.

"We're moving strongly towards IaaS, private and public cloud on the lower layer, and with all those applications moving into containers and orchestrated across a hybrid cloud scenario depending on the needs of our clients," said Schnapauff. "Then we have the data persistence layer that spans multiple cloud environments.

"Part of our application estate is already in that new environment, with strong movement for the rest to be included in the next year or so," he added.

MongoDB comes is a key part of the global data persistence layer, making the data quickly accessible to the applications that need it.

"The new platforms have lots of advantages in enabling services to be globally distributed and new storage persistent technologies like MongoDB are key in building those globally distributed data layers."

MongoDB is also a key element of Amadeus's Instant Search technology, which came to market earlier this year and which is used by the likes of Kayak. Meanwhile Couchbase finds a place in the caching layer.

"Caching content for well-defined key-value queries about seat availability is we're we are using Couchbase, while MongoDB is in use for the more open complex queries." he said.

Adopting new technologies such as hybrid cloud, NoSQL and containers requires new ways of working.

"There's a multitude of challenges," said Schnapauff.

"Running a global platform in a hybrid cloud scenario is a different way of working. Moving everything to containers requires new ways to develop and new ways to operate, like DevOps. It changes the way people work and the governance. It's more distributed with more partners involved, and they take a bigger role."

The applications, too, need to be adapted and re-architected for the hybrid cloud environment.

"Cloud platforms are more distributed and they gave different performance and resiliency capabilities, which make them extremely scalable but also requires that applications are constructed in a different way."

In the near future, Schnapauff hopes to be able to dispense with the relational databases the firm retains. While these are no longer used for search, they are still the best fit for handling the billions of transactions that Amadeus processes annually.

"The new techs do not cope fully with the transactional integrity and the loads. In these areas, relational databases are still state of the art, but the next step is to move from relational databases to other storage paradigms," he said.

"We are already seeing significant use cases moving off relational databases and working a whole lot better."

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