15below has the important responsibility of interfacing directly with their customer’s customer, the paying traveler. As they continue to grow and add new capabilities, the company is confident in their ability to achieve scale and maintain a flexible architecture. Like most software companies, 15below will likely grow in the areas of big data, analytics, mobile applications, and cloud computing, and the RabbitMQ community is already offering capabilities like Hadoop integration through AMQP. As well, Pivotal is running RabbitMQ as a service on Pivotal One and Pivotal CF, providing a path to future solutions.
To learn more, visit pivotal.io/products/pivotal-rabbitmq.
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15Below Case Study
1. 15below provides a platform for travel communication services and serves over 30 airline and rail companies such as Thomas Cook, Eurostar, Qantas, AirTran, and Jetblue. Their system communicates to travelers over their journey through itineraries, ticketing, check in, boarding passes, and more. 15below integrates with global reservation systems and other data sources, allowing their travel industry customers to apply complex business rules for highly targeted and personalized notifications to consumers. The system then renders output to mobile apps, SMS, email, voice, and print. 15below sends hundreds of millions of transactional consumer notifications each year across 19 countries and virtually every spoken language.
CHALLENGE
Dissatisfied Customers, Poor Performance, and an Inability to Scale
For 15below, travel providers pay for the service to perform when they need it, and, communications between travel providers and travelers are time-sensitive. Because of performance and scalability issues at 15below, travel companies were unable to always communicate in a timely manner with the traveling consumer. For example, a traveler might not get a flight delay notice via SMS on time. This meant 15below missed SLAs
and delivered lower customer satisfaction to travel provider
and traveler.
Under the hood, workflow tasks were being represented as rows in a SQL Server workflow table. Workflow processes were polling, processing the rows in batch, and updating the row status for the next process. According to lead architect and .NET developer, Mike Hadlow, “A relational database is not a natural fit for a queuing system. The contention on the workflow tables is high and locking issues arise from constant inserts, selects, and updates. We faced considerable problems with continuously growing tables, and deleting completed items caused problems on highly indexed tables.”
AT-A-GLANCE
Challenges
•
Dissatisfied Customers, Poor Performance, and an Inability to Scale
•
Need to replace data-base driven architecture with messaging
•
Unstable, Tightly Coupled Services
•
Fit with a Microsoft.NET Platform and Environment
Solution
•
RabbitMQ
Key Benefits
•
Improved Customer Satisfaction and Lowered Risk
•
Scaled Reliably with Improved Performance and Stability
•
More Effective Operations and Increased Uptime
•
Improved Speed to Market and Reduced Complexity
CASE STUDY
15Below
IMPROVING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION, SCALE, PERFORMANCE,
AND STABILITY
OVERVIEW
“ RabbitMQ has provided a rock solid piece of infrastructure. It has the features that allow us to significantly reduce the architectural complexity of our systems. We can now build fantastic software
for our clients faster and more reliably.”
—Mike Hadlow, Lead Architect and .NET Developer
pivotal.io