Join Cloudflare and FlySafair, the most on-time-airline in the world that rapidly grew to take 30% of the South African market in its young 3 year existence. Learn about the steps FlySafair took to improve the user experience of its e-commerce web presence and how Cloudflare Argo smart routed 4 million website requests and saved 15 days of load time per month.

1. How to Flip a Switch for
55% Web Performance Gains

2. Zander Bekker
Industrial Engineer
IT & Innovation Safair Operations
Christian Paulus
Head of Product Marketing
Speakers

3. Agenda
• FlySafair case study
• Argo Smart Routing
• Questions & Answers

4. The most On-Time Airline in the world
SINCE OCT 2014

5. Industry Pressures of Low Cost Carriers
• Majority of customers base
purchasing decision on price
• Price impacts customer loyalty
Direct selling through a
website to lower cost as a
key distributing channel
Customers
Airline website

7. User Experience
FlySafair Website Approach
SpeedUptime and Connection
Reliability

8. EXECUTE
Implement changes
PLAN
How can the current
process be improved?
IDENTIFY
Opportunities in the
process workflow
REVIEW
How changes working
for the team?
FlySafair Website Approach: Phases

9. New Relic - Most time consuming transactions
HIGH LEVEL
Dareboost: High level landing page
performance
MEDIUM LEVEL
Google Analytics: Individual page
load times, geo-location
performance, goal conversion
LOW LEVEL
New Relic: Low level specific
service and transactions time
Phase: Identify

10. PLAN
Weekly sprint planning:
• Review metrics and compare
• Execute 5 whys and root cause analysis
• Come up with hypotheses for improvement
• Discuss with team possible implementation methods
EXECUTE
Business rule: Always include one speed improvement item in each development sprint
REVIEW
Metrics reviewed following week, before and after analytics
Phases: Plan, Execute, and Review

11. Highlight Item: Scrapers Throttling

12. Server Side Success: Over the Years
7,000
1,367
2015 2016
137
2017
Milliseconds
• At one point diminishing returns by
improving code and hardware only
• Bottleneck determines overall speed
AWS Upgrade: CPU usage
went from 100% to 11.5%
Average Web Response Time

13. Connectivity is the Bottleneck

14. Undersee Cables
Connectivity from South Africa
via Europe to US

15. Holistic View required for Future Gains
AWS Server in NA
Radixx Reservation
Servers in NA
3rd party services.
Payments gateways,
marketing platforms
90% of web users
in South Africa

16. Cloudflare Argo Smart Routing
Cloudflare “New Feature” e-mail
• Added Argo Smart Routing to further improve performance
• Low cost add-on
• Easy set up: no development, configuration or implementation
effort—just flip a switch
• No risk: if it does not work as expected drop it the next month
• Easy reporting of performance gains in analytics dashboard

17. Customer Challenges
Origin
Congested
Network Path
Unreliable
Connection
Poor User Experience
Slow loading times and connection
timeouts increase the likelihood of a
poor user experience that can result
in reduced revenue or damaged
brand reputation
Slow Loading Times
Static routes can’t avoid congested
network paths or unreliable connection
Internet node / hop

18. Cloudflare Argo Smart Routing
Origin
Congested
Network Path
Unreliable
Connection
Faster Loading Times
Cloudflare routes over 10% of all HTTP Internet
traffic providing Argo with real world intelligence on
the fastest network paths.
Optimal Path Selection
Minimize latency imposed by
TCP connection-setup
Congestion Avoidance
Routing decisions using real-world
network conditions
Cloudflare’s private network
10Tbps throughput, with 117+ PoPs in 50+ countries
Internet node / hop
Cloudflare data center

19. Argo Impact on Web Latency
New Relic

20. Argo Impact on Reliability
Less 500 errors
Less lost connections

21. Argo Impact on User Experience
Browser Apdex T:
Your application’s End User
Apdex T-value is set to 15
seconds. That means end user
requests responding in less
than 15 seconds to the end
user are satisfying (s),
responding between 15
seconds and 60 seconds are
tolerating (t), and responding in
more than 60 seconds are
frustrating (f).

22. How did Cloudflare help?
• Improved user experience around the world:
As if Web server hosted closer to user
• Improved customer conversion observed
• Improved web transactions and User Apdex scores
• Reduced reports of lost connections
DDOS PROTECTION
DNS
IP FIREWALL
RATE LIMITING
Cloudflare was originally
selected for providing security:

23. Experiences/Lessons Learned
• Systematic approach required
• Holistic system thinking
• Experiment quickly. Don’t be afraid to fail and try new things

24. Questions & Answers
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