Seasonality affects every aspect of the travel industry, with peaks and troughs in both travel and bookings.
In terms of annual revenue, a major portion of it is earned during peak booking seasons and, from an IT perspective, this is a time of pressure for both staff and machines.
NB: This is an analysis by Asanga Nimalasena from CodeGen.
Any unplanned downtime or poor service times, as a result of IT issues during this time, could easily turn into thousands, if not millions, of pounds in lost revenue.
One of the common IT related issues regularly encountered during peak booking seasons is the resource saturation of the existing IT infrastructure.
The main cause for this is the high workload (booking/searches), which could be several times higher than at other periods. Resource saturation manifests itself in lack of memory available on servers, and a reduction in computing power, IO or network bandwidth limits etc.
There are several ways of overcoming the threat of resource saturation during peak season:
1) Historical references
The first option would be to carry out a capacity planning task based on historical and expected search/booking volumes in the coming season and then purchase the necessary resources well in advance.
However, businesses may be reluctant to spend on hardware or servers that are only really needed for a few months of the year.
2) Resource-based
A second option would be the dynamic provisioning of resource, as and when required.
This is a popular one, given the increase in the adoption of Infrastructure as a Server (IaaS), as it allows resources to be added and removed as needed.
More importantly, there’s no cost once the resources have been removed.
3) Tech approach
A third, but more undesirable option is request-throttling to stop the reservation system from crashing.
Needless to say, this strategy will result in a loss of revenue, so adding additional resource via option one or two would obviously be preferable to reducing potential sales to avoid an IT crash.
Implementation
So, the questions remain:
- "At what stage should a company decide that additional resource is needed?
- How far does the situation (and the end user experience) have to go before the decision is made and activated?
Auto Scaling is the answer.
Popularised by Amazon as part of its cloud solution, Auto Scaling allows dynamic provisioning and the decommissioning of servers based on predefined resource demand policies.
This provides a perfect solution for an industry that has a resource requirement with such seasonal variation.
The two aspects of Auto Scaling are availability and optimisation.
Availability ensures that any unhealthy or unreachable servers are terminated and seamlessly replaced by new ones, without any human intervention and without any downtime to the system.
Optimisation allows resource allocation based on demand and, more importantly from a financial perspective, only requires a business to pay for usage.
As with any technology adaptation, application testing is key to getting Auto Scaling to work with the desired consequences.
Reservation systems that are based on shared nothing architecture may have an easier implementation of Auto Scaling than systems that have an inter-server communication mechanism.
Thrashing is another possible pit-fall when using Auto Scaling.
Thrashing occurs when servers are added and removed from the resource pool in quick succession.
It’s often necessary to add resource quickly, so the key to avoiding thrashing is to ensure that sufficient time is taken over its removal.
Overall, Auto Scaling eliminates the acquisition of permanent resource in favour of dynamic resource for a more cost effective solution.
A dynamic resource allocation solution fits well with the seasonal load variation observed in many reservation systems.
With cloud adoption on the rise, Auto Scaling could be the key to leveraging a balance between concerns around cost versus system availability.
NB: This is an analysis by Asanga Nimalasena from CodeGen.
NB2: Codegen will be at stand T6 at Travel Technology Europe, the largest specialist event of its kind in Europe, which takes place on 25 and 26 February 2015 at the Olympia Exhibition Centre in London. REGISTER for FREE here.
NB3: Seasons image via Shutterstock.