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Navitaire’s Journey to Better Performance and Scale with Speedscale
- Industry: SaaS
- Use Cases: Legacy Software Migration, Service Mocking
Company
Navitaire is a leading provider of eCommerce solutions for the low-cost airline industry, and is a subsidiary of Amadeus, one of the world’s largest travel technology companies. Navitaire’s software solutions help airlines manage key customer operations, like booking, reservations, merchandising, distribution, and more.
The Challenge: Current testing approaches were too manual, inefficient, and costly
Darin Stromberg is a software architect on the team that manages Stratos, Navitaire’s new cloud-based portfolio of retailing solutions. In his role, he’s responsible for ensuring that the system is optimized for performance, particularly when there are high volumes of flight bookings.
When critical issues popped up, debugging would take a lot of time.
"If our customers had an incident in production, we used to have to dig through dump files and logs to diagnose and figure out what was going on, which took time and also had some data privacy implications."
Their engineers had been using open source solutions, like JMeter, NBomber, and Locust, but were finding these solutions too heavy on the scripting and overall maintenance. Plus, they found them too limiting because “you can only test what you’ve scripted—you can’t really customize it much,” according to Darin.
At some point, Darin and the team had considered building their own test framework to meet their needs, but preferred something off-the-shelf where they would be able to get support for their large and distributed team.
Darin met the Speedscale team in-person at API World, and became interested when he heard how
Speedscale could help automate more of their development and testing through simulating their production environments. Because Navitaire Stratos was a Kubernetes shop from day one, the team thought it made sense to work with Speedscale with its microservices-first approach.
Driving productivity and cost savings by simulating production environments
After a demo and proof of value exercise, Navitaire decided to officially partner with Speedscale, saying they were aligned on Speedscale’s traffic-based approach, and were further influenced by how easy the Speedscale team was to work with.
“We liked Speedscale’s approach of capturing traffic, redacting sensitive data, and then replaying it in a dev environment. We instantly saw how it could make our lives easier, plus save a lot of time and money.”
By simulating production instead of scripting, Navitaire could automatically generate more accurate scenarios that matched real-life conditions, which in turn would help them meet one of their main goals: “gate-checking more issues before deploying to production.”
Darin believed strongly that using Speedscale would not only help their productivity and efficiency, but would also present a financial benefit as well.
“It costs the company a lot of money to investigate all these incidents that pop up. I believe that there is a significant amount of money that we could mitigate if we could catch things before they happen with Speedscale.”
Navitaire’s implementation of Speedscale is still in its infancy, but they’ve already started to drum up tests for some key use cases. Today, they use Speedscale primarily for simulating production conditions to ensure their flight availability service can scale as expected for thousands of calls per second.
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They’ve also begun exploring Speedscale’s mocking capabilities for their legacy platform. To validate their own software, Navitaire often needs to return responses, or mock, different services from each of the airlines they support. Today, this is set up manually in lower environments, with multiple versions of their legacy platform environment hooked up to each individual carrier. They hope to replace the current setup with Speedscale’s traffic-based environments in the future.
“We’re still in the early days, but as we get more of an established practice going, we definitely envision testing far more than just the ‘happy path’ with Speedscale.”
