Success story

WebBeds

API Management Case Study

Optimized the search engine for WebBeds marketplace, helping them manage API requests better.

12-15%

Cost of infrastructure
reduced

20%

Of the duplicate traffic in the inventory cached

Business overview

Our team, in collaboration with the Platform Engineering team of the client, helped to reduce the number of API requests to be processed for one of the main APIs of the client. We evolved and improved a caching solution originally implemented by the client in Go language, turning it into a scalable system that optimizes the network traffic and reduces time taken in processing and calculations. Our solution reduced the cloud infrastructure costs by optimizing the searches made in the search engine, consuming fewer resources. As a result, they had fewer cloud instances and saved about 15% of the current cost.

Background

WebBeds is one of the few global bed banks that makes ground travel products accessible to more than 430000 hotels in more than 16000 destinations worldwide.

They offer powerful distribution solutions to hotels, making selling and buying accommodation easier. Thousands of travel agencies regularly connect to the WebBeds Marketplace and generate several billion searches daily.

Business need

The XML API service that WebBeds provides to its multiple stakeholders receives around 4 million search requests per minute, many of which are the same even in a brief period.

Caching the requests and their responses over a certain time was a key objective to allow fast responses for duplicated ones (a hit in the cache) and avoid processing them by the hotel search engine. This part, reducing the processing of duplicate searches, could significantly reduce cloud infrastructure costs (network traffic and CPU processing). Achieving a conservative hit ratio between 15 and 20% can directly reduce the same proportion of cost in the monthly invoice from the cloud provider. When we talk about a platform with around 4 billion requests per day, it is not a negligible figure.

Solution

Our AWS Solution Architecture specialists, together with the development team collaborated with the Platform Engineering team of the client to build a solution. We evolved and improved a caching solution originally implemented by the client in Go language, turning it into an scalable system that optimises the network traffic and reduces the processing and calculations. The implemented cache is agnostic and adaptable to serve as a cache for multiple services across different WebBeds platforms.

Additionally, the team developed custom tools for cache benchmarks that allow control and further maintenance. Using best practices like Infrastructure as a Code as well as Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, the team made it easy for the solution to keep evolving and be easily maintained.

Our API Management solution enabled:

Fast time of response
(less than one millisecond)

Able to manage a high volume of requests (several millions per minute)

Adjusted infrastructure costs, the solution is saving much more than its own cost

Results

After the full rollout of the solution, all the searches made by the clients on one of WebBeds' platforms are now cached by the new application. The new application requires minimal maintenance and has low operating costs. This reduced the overall infrastructure cost by between 12% and 15%.

Also, the time taken for caching the duplicated requests was at a magnitude of seconds, which is now reduced to milliseconds. The knowledge, improvements, and evolutions made in the cache application provide opportunities for continued improvements to other parts of the WebBeds ecosystem.

Our environment is complex, and we manage billions of operations per day. The Nagarro team did adapt to our way of working, understanding the challenge they had on their hands and contributing with knowledge and creativity. They show courage and confidence in facing complex scenarios within short delivery times. Webbeds is in a fast transformation process, and we appreciate a partner that understands that and works with our team.

Gabriel Pérez Salazar

Director of Engineering - Webbeds

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