'Tech powers the travel': Expedia's never-ending journey to a modern stack
Migration and rationalisation must happen in parallel, says chief architect Rajesh Naidu
The Covid pandemic was an impetus for digital transformation and modernisation. For travel giant Expedia, facing the potential loss of its entire business model, it was a wake-up call.
Expedia Group, which owns the Expedia brand, is still very much in the travel space, but it now styles itself as "a tech company that covers travel."
That's partly down to a massive IT re-architecture, still ongoing, that the company began in early 2020, just before the world went into lockdown.
Rajesh Naidu is leading the project as Expedia Group's chief architect (plus head of data platform & data management). His role, as you might be able to tell, has massive scope.
"I have responsibility for architecture across all of Expedia, and this covers everything from business architecture to enterprise architecture, solution, security infrastructure, data - I might be missing one of them. And it covers not just my team, but also our marketing and branch organisation corporate systems, as well as Expedia for business."
That's not even touching the data side - and, of course, his role spans both the B2C and B2B sides of Expedia.
Cracking the stack
Expedia Group began its modernisation before Rajesh joined in 2022 and has already moved more than two-thirds of its systems and data to the cloud - and is aiming to be 90% cloud-native. However, just moving off-prem wasn't the end of the work.
"We are re-architecting because we did a lift-and-shift on certain things, because we had to exit our data centres," he explains.
"Where we are going now is re-architecting those in the cloud, making them more cloud-native. In some cases that is the work that we're doing: moving it, making it microservices. That work is going to be continuing.
"So, the lift and shift has happened in some cases, but it's now about actually taking that down and making it work."
For years, Expedia Group has had a growth-by acquisition-model, but the company strategy was to keep the brands operating as standalone companies. Now, Rajesh's team is responsible for bringing all the brands' IT into a common tech stack - and ensuring that stack is both scalable and resilient.
Microservices were made to order for the work, helping break down the monolithic stack and rebuild it as a series of small, independent products. Expedia can then use that to power "both our B2C as well as our B2B business," says Rajesh.
"So, the rearchitecting is on multiple fronts: getting out of our data centre, moving to the cloud, modernising and getting to the latest technology."
Guiding the AWS roadmap
Like most US companies, Seattle-based Expedia uses AWS as its primary cloud provider, which is helping it "push the limits of Kubernetes and containerisation."
Expedia is using the cloud's elasticity to support its 168 million loyalty customers, 3 million properties and 50,000 B2B partners.
"We have about 70 petabytes of data that we're crunching through for AI and ML and these kinds of combinations," says Rajesh.
"We are one of the strategic customers. We are in a strategic group with [AWS] and four of the largest customers. We get a chance to sit in the leadership forum with them, and we get to compare stories and we get to enhance the product and the roadmap...
"We are, in some cases, co-inventing with AWS on the on the upper limits of their infrastructure."
"We constantly need to evolve"
Expedia launched its mass modernisation programme in early 2020, and is now more than 70% of the way through.
But, despite the progress, Rajesh's team acknowledges that the process is ongoing.
"It's hard to pinpoint when it will be done, because what I'm trying to instil in our organisation is we constantly need to evolve.
"This architecture is not set, because the moment we are set, we have lost something, because we are not evolving with the market."
The mass impetus at first, in common with other companies, was to migrate the core, critical systems to the cloud. Now that's been done, the architecture team is looking to improvements like introducing new capabilities faster without breaking and evolving the architecture to take advantage of the latest features.
It is, Rajesh says, "a never-ending process." Some core back-end areas, like finance, will remain largely unchanged as stability is so important. They will be "locked down, and we'll probably look at them every few years."
However, he adds, "we constantly want to be iterating" on everything partner-related - that is, anything that touches a customer, supplier or traveller.
For a company where "tech powers the travel," that's both a sensible and bold approach. Expedia's architecture team will never be able to sit back and say, "Done" - and perhaps more IT teams should accept that as reality.