Some details
bookingkit is one of the leading Berlin-based companies from the leisure industry, highly recognized in the sector. The company operates as a neutral Global Distribution System (GDS) to provide travel agencies and marketing networks access to tours and activities in the form of a digital inventory. It is also a web-based and integrated solution (software as a service) for providers of tours and activities.
We were
approached with an idea depicting how they would like to change their platform’s architecture to enable scaling it even further. The chosen solution is based on sharding - creating a number of instances sharing the same codebase but with different datasets derived from the source and divided by the chosen factor.Such an approach, similarly to Microservice architecture, creates certain challenges like:
- providing API access allowing data consumption,
- creation across all the instances like it would be a single application.
That can be achieved for instance by creating an API gateway in front of the application instances, and that is what we aimed for.
In addition, a solution had to:
- meet certain performance criteria in terms of response speed,
- be flexible to allow for further development of the main application,
- scalable to support the growth of the user base and possibly the number of instances.
All of this has to be highly available - bookingkit is working with demanding partners such as Trip Advisor or Get Your Guide, which means their services have to be available 24/7.
