TicketMe: switching to Cloud

IT infrastructure of the TicketMe transport aggregator was finally switched to the loud resource — switching was completed successfully in March of this year.

The switching process was not easy - Cloud faced challenge of emergency and global changes, the entire market was being rebuilt.

According to Sergey Khmelnitsky, Managing Director of Information System Development, as a result, we managed to come together to greater flexibility and reliability, while reducing costs - cost of renting servers decreased for Vipservice by more than 2 times! “I can already give several examples that followed change in architecture and switching of Transport Aggregator to cloud technologies. So, one of our subagents dramatically increased a search query - earlier we simply could not have scaled quickly, but now we managed it in just three days. Another illustrative example is the increase in demand for Aeroflot services against the backdrop of departure of global distributors, which also occurred in a short time.”

Now the system is working stably, Vipservice and Cloud are mutually beneficial as large and reliable partners. However, let's be honest, it did not happen immediately: in the background there were both "cost optimization" and "long testing period", a difficult way to build interaction with a technical support service.

In turn, Pavel Pavelchuk, Director of Information Technology, notes an increase of system fault tolerance. “At the very beginning we understood that partners had so-called “growth problems” in the technical support - they did not always have competence to resolve issues through HelpDesk on the first line. But now we are satisfied with the team of specialists with which we cooperate - a new level of interaction: 2-4 hours - and there is a solution. ” “Thanks to Cloud, we gained flexibility in use of resources - we can quickly adjust them depending on situation and tasks,” the speaker sums up. An important factor in the selection was the need for Cloud to provide assistance during switching — unification of networks and communication channels, reconfiguration of servers and active network equipment, and resolution of other issues that arose during switching. In addition, convenience of infrastructure management using the Enterprise platform and data storage security played a role.

When Cloud received a new quotation for the requested resources, the option agreement already existed. Understanding that Cloud had a large set of ready-made services, flexibility of these services, the distributed data center in Russia, one of the giants of IT services on the market, caused Vipservice to choose it as a Partner, since the holding always values ​​its customers and is extremely careful in choosing new solutions, as far as the situation always allows. An important role was also played by the fact that initially, not the most “budget” partner did not raise prices, but retained the conditions, while many of its competitors increased them, when the general situation on the market has been changing from the end of February. At the same time, demand for NDC on the part of Vipservice's clients greatly increased - new tasks for managing flows appeared.

One of the factors in making a decision for Vipservice was a guarantee of service availability (SLA) of at least 99.95%, 24/7/365 support and the capability to quickly scale computing power.

“Prerequisites for switching were a year ago - it is a natural process of developing our own products, we have been monitoring since June 2021. There was not just a move from one data center to another, but a change in the architecture of Transport Aggregator to meet the challenges of  time. Today, we can say that we are dealing with something of a higher order, a kind of hybrid: it was just a car, and now this car can also fly,” comments Sergey Khmelnitsky.

For reference

The transport aggregator is a specialized system that transforms various protocols of carriers and global distribution systems into unified ones.

Cloud (Cloud Technologies LLC) is a cloud provider of IaaS and PaaS services (IT infrastructure for rent) for individuals, start-ups, small, medium, large businesses, government agencies and corporations. We offer 60+ cloud services, a virtual data center, a full-cycle ML development platform based on two Christofari and Christofari Neo supercomputers.