Managing a Successful Business Transition with AWS

Harsh Sood, CTO, Fareportal

Recently, Fareportal had to move our entire data center on short notice. The building we housed our data center in Manhattan, NY was purchased and all tenants had to leave. As we were getting ready for a move to New Jersey, the main priority for us was to ensure 100 percent up time for all our consumer-facing websites. As one of the four largest online travel agencies next to Expedia, Priceline and Orbitz , as the only air-focused online travel agency, our flagship website CheapO air receives thousands of flight searches and bookings every day and can’t afford any downtime.

Fareportal’s engineering staff had minimal time to prepare for such a labor-intensive move, full of complexities and scale. To ensure everything on both, our CheapOair and OneTravel websites was running smoothly as we were moving the complex infrastructure, we decided to implement Amazon Web Services for the duration of the data center move. With a very short turn-around, we needed a solution that was quick and painless for our engineering staff to implement and would ensure 100 percent operations for our customers.

“Our flagship website CheapO air receives thousands of flight searches and bookings every day and can’t afford any downtime”

Within a day, Amazon Web Services was up and running and helped the Fareportal engineering team get through a busy and stressful time with ease and with 100 percent up time.

Tips:

Use AWS as a back-up method, especially during transitional times such as a data center move, office move, hyper growth period or a special promotion that drives more traffic to your e-commerce site.
Use AWS if easy and quick set-up is a critical priority.
AWS is easy to scale, so you can adjust your implementation as your business needs change.
AWS allows any business to conduct uninterrupted business and e-commerce operations while dealing with business-critical changes, such as conducting a larger data center move.