HOW THE WORLD'S SECOND FASTEST GROWING BEDBANK ENTRUSTS ITS INTEGRATIONS TO US
Ensuring that everything is working properly
WebBeds, as a division of the large WebJet, listed as part of the ASX 200 online business in the tourism sector and as the fastest growing company and second largest B2B bed bank worldwide, collaborates with us. Our relationship started in 2017 , when SunHotels, a WebBeds platform and one of the largest providers in Northern Europe, trusted us to do a first integration with one of their clients, and they were so happy with the result that they started to give us more projects. They liked our way of working very much, they felt that FDSA integrated perfectly into their daily work and met their needs. They valued not only the quality of our code, but also the security and confidence that we transmitted. And thanks to the relationship of trust and closeness that we had already forged with SunHotels, WebBeds continued to trust FDSA to develop its integration hub with the different providers that connect to its platform:businesses in which milliseconds of response time turn into more or less sales, in which calls to APIs are measured in hundreds of thousands per minute, in which integrated systems are counted in hundreds and in which a system down seriously affects the service.
Robust, fast and efficientcode
When a person makes a search to book a hotel room anywhere in the world through Booking, Tripadvisor or Expedia, a complex process begins that the user does not perceive, as it is managed beyond the visible part of the business. There are hundreds of agents within hotel distribution: metasearch engines, OTAs, agencies, websites, wholesalers, etc. For all these agents to be able to instantly access the WebBeds beds, the integrations must workperfectly. Instantly and with no margin for error. Our integrations have received almost 200,000 requests per minute, and WebBeds receives a booking every 8 seconds, so a breakdown of the integrations would result in considerable losses. Having the confidence and assurance that this will not happen is important.
The methodology that fits the needs and a solution that delivers results.
Due to the success of the collaboration and the complexity of the projects in which we participated, the software architects of WebBeds helped us to introduce the most advanced tools in software development. This help has led us to establish in FDSA a high knowledge of scalability, robustness and programming methodologies that allow us to have an efficient code development. The main improvements we have made are the following:
We create a common library
We created a common library that allowed us to simplify development, which helped to reduce the development time of each integration by up to 40%.
We optimise the code at a low level
We optimised the code at a low level, achieving better scalability of the applications to meet business needs.
We apply TDD
We applied TDD (Test-Driven-Development), which allowed us to develop robust, readable and clean code. In addition, it allowed us to run automated tests on each new version of the code,
We use DevOps culture and tools
We used the DevOps culture and tools, allowing the team to be aware of the resources being used and the costs involved in production.
We implement CI/CD
We implemented CI/CD, ideal for automating version updates more frequently and with higher quality, reducing Time To Market from 2h to 10 min.
Moving from a monolithic application to microservices
We moved from a monolithic application to microservices in Cloud, Docker and Kubernetes, which allow us to create a scalable and adaptable integration on demand.
We use monitoring tools such as Grafana
We use monitoring tools such as Grafana, keeping track and alerts to control possible failures of the application and infrastructures in real time.
Did you know that...?
These techniques that you have read about are essential for the correct functioning of API integrations not only in the hotel sector, but for all those companies that handle a high number of requests. The key is to evolve little by little, to implement new improvements in order to have more and more advanced development techniques. In other words, trying to have a business culture of continuous improvement that allows us to reach technical excellence. We are giving you an ebook where we explain how we organise ourselves at FDSA to become more efficient every day. Among other things, you will find how our work philosophy is and a practical pill about TDD (Test-Driven-Development).Test-Driven-Development) that will help you to develop a cleaner, more robust and agile code.