TripStack scales its business on GCP with help from SADA

Founded in 2016, TripStack is a travel technology company specializing in low-cost carriers (LCC) and Virtual Interlining (VI). The Toronto-based company maintains a database of Every Flight on Earth (EFOE) and serves more than 4.8 million passengers annually. 

TripStack’s VI solution combines flights from carriers that don’t have interline agreements and allows partners access to more than 100 low-cost-carriers globally. The platform analyzes billions of price points to build the cheapest and best flight itineraries and returns the results via the TripStack API in less than 1 second. 

The TripStack API provides the users flight itineraries at the best possible prices as well as the most popular ancillaries including Baggage, Seat Selection, and Branded Fares.

Business challenge

“We experienced all the natural hurdles that come with a startup,” said Derek Marshall, Chief Technology Officer at TripStack. “Linear growth was not possible with our previous infrastructure, and we were preparing for the next stage of scaling our business. ”

TripStack’s engineering department manages a hybrid approach for maintaining database accuracy that combines cloud services with their data center. The department decided to look at their architecture from a holistic view and determined it was time to change the entire infrastructure to better accommodate the 24/7 e-commerce systems to which TripStack provides content. Uptime and productivity are very important to TripStack’s clients and contribute greatly to the company’s profitability.  

Solution

After an extensive review of cloud platform providers, Marshall and his team selected Google Cloud Platform (GCP) due to its technological edge and SADA, Google Cloud Premier Partner, for their compatible engineering culture. With SADA, they set out to lift and shift the comprehensive platform that runs tens of millions of transactions a day from the prior provider to GCP.

“It was a huge change to undertake. We looked at different partners with the goal of finding the one with the most technical acumen and the right cultural fit with our team. After the first meeting, it became apparent that SADA understood our situation and clearly had the experience to make this transition a success.”

Derek Marshall | Chief Technology Officer at TripStack

SADA recommended Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Cloud SQL. GKE provides a managed environment for deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications using Google Cloud infrastructure. Additionally, running GKE clusters provides access to Google Cloud’s advanced cluster management features, including load-balancing, node pools, node auto-repair, automatic scaling, automatic software upgrades, and logging and monitoring. Cloud SQL is a fully managed relational database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server that runs them with their rich extension collections, configuration flags, and developer ecosystem without the need for self-management.

“Google Cloud is very container-native,” said Bart Barcicki, Software Engineer at TripStack. “We run at least 50% of our workload on Kubernetes so we need it to work well. Leveraging GKE has been very straightforward and much easier compared to our previous provider’s Elastic Kubernetes Service.”  

Results

SADA went all-in on TripStack’s cloud migration process, including initial discovery, planning, and design phases followed by a series of migrations for segmented workloads. The engagement from start to finish only took 16 weeks.

“SADA worked as hard as we did to meet our objectives.”

Derek Marshall | Chief Technology Officer at TripStack

In summary, SADA and Google Cloud helped TripStack:

• Migrate their platform from the previous provider to GCP
• Cut infrastructure costs by 50%
• Improve reliability of their 24/7 service offering 
• Establish proactive measures to prepare for continued growth