Case Study: Despegar achieves high availability, optimized website performance, and rapid feature deployment with F5 Networks

Despegar Leads Latin American Travel Industry with its Modern, Responsive Websites

Despegar, Latin America’s largest online travel agency, needed to scale its 21 country-specific websites to handle rapidly growing traffic, guarantee continuous availability, distribute users across two data centers, and accelerate deployment of new features. To address these challenges it relied on F5 Networks’ BIG-IP platform (deployed on VIPRION chassis) including BIG-IP LTM, BIG-IP GTM/BIG-IP DNS and the programmability tools iRules and iControl.

F5 Networks implemented BIG-IP LTM for local traffic management, BIG-IP GTM for multi-data-center routing and failover, and used iRules/iControl to give developers direct control and automation in Despegar’s OpenStack private cloud. The solution ensured high availability and optimized performance, doubled appliance capacity via VIPRION blade upgrades, handled a reported 10x traffic increase since 2008, and dramatically accelerated release velocity—developers moved from 1–2 changes per week to deploying hundreds of enhancements per day.

Despegar

Nicolas Pla

Technology Manager