Case Study: HolidayCheck achieves rapid, scalable international deployments with Akka

HolidayCheck's journey with Typesafe

HolidayCheck is a large online travel site founded in 1999 that today serves 20–30 million monthly visitors and catalogs over 300,000 hotels and 100,000 points of interest; during peak booking season it sees more than 100 million page impressions per week. Growth and the need to launch slightly different products for multiple markets exposed limitations in their original LAMP stack—code/platform complexity, stability and performance problems made it hard to scale, duplicate services, and meet a goal of deploying new or changed front-end applications in days.

HolidayCheck re-architected on the Typesafe Reactive Platform, adopting Scala and the Akka runtime alongside a polyglot persistence and ecosystem (Neo4j, MongoDB, Kafka, Hadoop, etc.), and invested in Typesafe training to ramp teams. Within about 15 months they began to realize ROI: improved scalability, more productive development (especially with skilled engineers), faster time-to-market, and greater confidence and support for running reactive, asynchronous services across dynamic cloud and cluster environments.

HolidayCheck

Christopher Schmidt

Senior Lead Architect