1. Flight Centre Limited
How MongoDB has empowered the business
to rapidly respond to market conditions
Michael Frost
Web Solution Architect

2. Flight Centre
Flight Centre Limited is one of the world's largest travel agency
groups, with more than 2000 leisure, corporate and wholesale
businesses in 11 countries.
After starting with one shop 30 years ago, we have enjoyed
remarkable ongoing growth.
Our rapidly expanding network now extends throughout Australia, New
Zealand, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South
Africa, Hong Kong, India, China, Singapore and the United Arab
Emirates, providing travellers with a complete service.

3. Flight Centre Online
• 120 Online staff (Web Developers, SEO, Copy Writers,
SEM, Application Developers, Online Marketers,
Creative designers and Usability experts)
• 60 Web sites over 6 different countries
• Up to 200,000 pages on a site
• Larger sites have 450,000 views per day
• Multiple booking engines Air, Hotel, Sea, Insurance, Car
• Two data centres for web hosting. Physical in Brisbane
and Amazon EC2

4. Brands Implemented

5. Business Problem
• Product feeds for lead-in pricing (15 feeds
and growing). 750,000 records
• Content feeds (Hotel, Ship, Cruise Line,
IATA, Destination). 550,000 records
– Every feed has unique model
• Need to override content
– Each brand in each country is a different
business
• Need to be responsive to market. E.g. new
cruise ship, or cruise ship sinks

6. Business Problem
• Content has different models, e.g. cruise
ship content compared with hotel
• Business constantly demand new model
types or changes to existing models
– Hotel
• Majority developers are front end web

7. Solution Architecture Diagram

8. FCL MongoDB Environment
• FCL data centre
RHEL6 64Bit
2 X CPU
7G RAM
100G data partition
• Amazon servers
c1.xlarge Amazon EC2 instances
• MongoDB V2.0.3
• Replication with one master, and 2 slaves in each datacentre. New
slaves can be quickly brought up if demand requires
• 5 databases with up to 55 collections in a database
• ~ 600,000 MongoDB requests per day
• 2 mil records

9. Hosting environment
with Amazon data centre
•Akamai geo-load balanced
data centres
•No single point of failure for
hosting
•Each data centre is
designed to take full load if
one data centre goes down
•Each layer in each stack
can be extended quickly if
unexpected massive load
came through

10. What we found with MongoDB
• Developers do not need to worry about
schemas
• Business can come to developers with new
feed, content type, product, to be loaded in
– E.g. Cruise Ship, Cruise Line, IATA location data,
Hotel content, Hotel imaging
– Define own domain models
• Native way of thinking with Web Dev
(JSON/REST)
• Powers the majority of our sites

11. What we found with MongoDB
• Arbiter is only used to provide extra votes
that the master we want stays as master
• If master goes down slaves will continue
to allow reads. Writes will not work
– Writes are not mission critical – Competitions
and the like
• SLAVE_OK so slaves can perform reads

12. What we found with MongoDB
• Web solution enhancements become easier
– Used to use Oracle
• Oracle was homogenous. Had to know domain
model and data structure up front.
– With MongoDB we are able to change domain model
at any point. Even at a record level.
• We do not use sharding. Our data set did not
easily provide a shard key
– Has not affected performance while data can fit in
memory

13. Example- Cruise
Page comprises of:
•Call to product for lead-in pricing, then
•Call to Ship content
•Call to Cruise Line content
•Call for other sailings
•Page response time (without Akamai):
200ms

14. Moving forward
• Moved to cloud – Amazon EC2
– MongoDB makes this much easier and cheaper than
Oracle
• Multiple data centres catering for local countries
– Replication model for read only is trivial. Write
requires a bit of thinking
• Data centre fail over
– Each data centre will be able cater for all FCL country
load
• Application Developers changing to elastic design
– MongoDB is well suited for elastic solutions

15. Lessons learnt
• New projects are very easy
• Converting heavy relational models takes some time
• Use case of data is important to know upfront
– Our product model denormalises to 80 fields
– Indexes are important and require constant review
• Our developers can hit the models with any permutation of ways
(id, location, supplier, star rating, keyword, duration)
• Performance for new solutions excellent, performance
after converting relation solution required more
hardware. A minor redesign in our solution will solve
performance issues
– Thinking about problems in a relational way is inefficient
with MongoDB. Need to tackle problems with a different
mind set

16. Lessons learnt
• Learning curve for Web Developers easy.
Learning curve for Application Developers a little
longer (use to relational world)
• Traditional reporting tools do not work easily.
– Created a data warehouse in Oracle for reporting
• Global write lock. Make sure database size fits in
memory

17. Questions
Michael Frost
Flight Centre Limited
Michael.Frost@flightcentre.com.au