Universal Places leverages CloudBees Platform

Overall, implementing CloudBees’ PaaS helped Universal Places cut the time it spent weekly on non-development tasks and IT infrastructure from 16 hours to about 30 minutes. This has enabled software developers to focus more time on improving web applications and efficiently managing the agency’s business.

The support CloudBees provided for simple configuration, rapid deployment and easy scaling also allowed Universal Places to better manage seasonal ebbs and flows in agency bookings. CloudBees’ ability to scale enables Universal Places to accommodate server demands that can fluctuate by a factor of 10 from month to month, with business shifting dramatically to the seaside hotels portal from April through September, and to the B&B countryside portal from October through May.

“With CloudBees we have shortened time to market because we are spending 80 percent less time resolving infrastructure issues,” says Juan Rodriguez Feria, CTO, Universal Places, and lead architect of the company’s Internet platform. “The CloudBees Platform automatically scales, so we always have enough servers to meet traffic demands in the high season, but we’re not paying for servers when we don’t need them in the low season. Never has it been easier to manage a Java IT infrastructure and deploy to production.”

Universal Places initially hosted the travel portals on a traditional infrastructure that it set up in house. It rapidly outgrew this setup and migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS). After evaluating several PaaS solutions, the Universal Places development team selected the CloudBees runtime services based on ease of use, configurability, an extensive partner ecosystem and one-click deployment and rollback.

From the start, the CloudBees Platform fit well with the team’s agile methodology for rapid development and continuous delivery of Java applications with Grails. “We installed the CloudBees Grails plugin, configured some parameters and the database, and in minutes we had our first app running on CloudBees,” Feria said.

The team’s previous deployment process required numerous manual steps, including uploading of the WAR file via FTP, backing up databases, starting and stopping application servers and redirecting web servers. Reverting to a previous version of the app was equally arduous. With the CloudBees Platform, the process has been greatly streamlined – with the database backups and requests to deploy each done in just one click.
The development team has plans in place to incorporate continuous integration (CI) into its development process using the CloudBees development services, powered by Jenkins.

“The economy in recent years has been challenging for the travel industry. Leisure properties face stiffer competition than ever connecting with travelers and converting them to sales,” said Steven G. Harris, senior vice president of products, CloudBees. “They need an IT infrastructure to facilitate opportunities – not hold their businesses back. Universal Places has made incredible strides, using the CloudBees platform to become more efficient, scalable and productive. We look forward to working with the Universal Places development team on additional Continuous Cloud Delivery initiatives to drive further improvements in the business.”