Leading travel platform eases network management with Traefik

Overview

Covering all aspects of traveling, hotels, flights, car rental, and vacation homes, this world leading travel company’s platform is managed by an infrastructure team that counts over one thousand engineers. This infrastructure engineering team supports an expansive brand portfolio, ensuring transactions are always up and running smoothly, a monumental task given the sheer scale of their business. Given the diversity of applications across their brands, the group delicately supports a wide range of networking solutions and programming languages throughout the organization.

Challenge

Like many other large companies, this leading travel company’s broad range of applications had requirements for specific tools and platforms, such as various containerization solutions. As a result, the team managed a multitude of container platforms, each having a unique networking configuration and runtime to operate. This made management of these environments very difficult and time consuming because each network change needed to be applied one-by-one for each and every environment (i.e. Amazon ECS and Kubernetes, Mesos and Marathon, etc).

The team set out to find a proxy solution flexible enough to work across multiple platforms such as Consul, Mesos, and Kubernetes, while integrating natively with each platform’s unique discovery mechanisms and information models. What they needed was a single reverse proxy solution to standardize and consolidate the existing disparate solutions to reduce operational overhead, simplify new deployments, and minimize human errors during configuration changes. Given the company’s size, the “perfect” solution would need to meet specific requirements around massive scalability, ease and speed of deployment, and function efficiently in highly-dynamic containerized environments.

Solution

The leading travel company’s infrastructure team stumbled onto Traefik while evaluating and testing different solutions in the networking landscape of the containerized world.

Traefik offers the ability for engineering teams to plug in multiple data sources, such as Mesos, Marathon, Consul, etc, all with the use of a single tool. Traefik’s wide array of pluggable providers connects to any compatible data source, presenting a unified and consistent platform for traffic routing. This feature appealed greatly to the engineering team and encouraged a closer look.

Traefik is a lean implementation, written in Go, and a single binary which makes it easy to deploy. Traefik offers extensive configuration options, suitable for any application scenario and scale. With advanced routing capabilities, Traefik was one of the only solutions capable of easily configuring multiple advanced routes per service and running custom configuration templates. Ultimately, the engineering team chose Traefik for its simplicity and ease of maintenance and configuration.

By standardizing on Traefik as their reverse proxy of choice across all environments, the engineering team saved countless hours by simplifying network operation management.

The company is also committed to the values of open source, supporting and encouraging open source throughout the organization. As an open source project, Traefik bolsters their commitment to consume and contribute to open source software as part of the greater community. They found engagement with the Traefik developer community to be responsive, receptive and collaborative, something important to them as well.

Bottom Line

This leading travel company’s selection of Traefik as their preferred reverse proxy solution, enables them to achieve increased delivery speed at scale, even in the rapidly and ever-evolving container ecosystem.

In spite of their vigorous requirements tested throughout the evaluation process, Traefik easily passed with flying colors, proving its ability to handle the most demanding workloads in high traffic environments. The team is experiencing greater simplicity managing large scale containerized infrastructure while enhancing ease of maintenance by delivering features critical to this unique environment.

The engineering team happily recommends Traefik to other organizations facing the same challenges.

“Traefik pretty much supports itself. There isn’t much support that we require from outside. Things just work. I absolutely recommend Traefik.”

What’s Next?


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://traefik.io/blog/leading-travel-platform-simplifies-network-management-by-deploying-traefik-as-preferred-reverse-proxy/