As businesses grows in customers, users, resources, data and applications, scalable and secure applications in the Cloud have become even more critical than before. At Booking.com they want to be sure that they are working with a partner that will help them succeed. Therefore, they partnered with SUE, due to our proven ability to empower their Cloud Native journey and that we have experience professionals on the job that knows everything there is to know about Cloud & IT. With 100% dedication at making business needs become a reality

✓ Discover all Benefits. ✓ Advanced Cloud Native Intel. ✓ Business Best Practices.

At SUE we are committed to helping our customers find the best ways of managing their data and applications. We believe that no matter what your needs are, there's always a solution for you with Cloud Native technologies. Read more about our partnership with Booking.com, what it brings to the table and how we deliver on our promises, always.

About the Customer

Booking.com is the world’s leading digital travel company, seamlessly connecting millions of travellers to memorable experiences, transportation options and incredible accommodations. Booking.com is available in 43 languages and offers more than 28 million reported accommodation listings, including over 6.6 million homes, apartments, and other unique places to stay. Their mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.

The challenge

Due to the rapid growth of financial systems across the organization, Booking.com needed a solution to build and redeploy SAP environments efficiently within AWS. Expertise was needed to enable this growth and make impactful decisions with regard to the AWS architecture.  

The solution

To reduce complexity and increase the speed of deployments, Sue designed, developed and implemented a deployment strategy viaCI/CD pipelines. To automate the build of SAP systems globally, Sue used configuration management- and IAC tooling. We used a single source of truth (using a YAML file) to describe all required AWS resources and their respective configurations. This dramatically reduces the complexity of setting up environments and allows (SAP) engineers without extensive knowledge of AWS, Automation and Infrastructure-as-Code to deploy their SAP environments. 

An (SAP) engineer can make changes to the YAML file and commit those changes in a repository. Multiple (sanity) checks are done during the process, and an engineer verifies the modified YAML file before merging the code. A pipeline is then triggered in which the configuration management tool is used to generate code for the IAC tool that creates the specified resources in AWS.       

After the creation of the resources in AWS, instances created using the IAC tooling will be configured via configuration management. These compute instances are bootstrapped using custom created Machine Images. The configuration management tool will install patches, configure storage, set up the declarative configuration management tool, mount storage volumes and register the instances in the monitoring environment. The images in combination with the configuration management tooling apply several OS related security best practices. Sue improves OS hardening in the AWS environment using the images and configuration management tooling specific code.

Before starting the configuration, a check is done to ensure that the configuration is valid and unchanged. Lastly, the declarative configuration management tooling applies policies created by Booking.com on the instances. Below is a (simplified) overview of the entire process.

The pipelines are designed to improve the speed of creating and implementing AWS environments at scale for SAP systems. High availability and scalability are achieved via a combination of AWS solutions such as Cloud compute instances, storage,file system components and load Balancers. With the new AWS environments and CI/CD pipelines, Sue migrated the physical servers and the SAP services to the AWS cloud, leveraging today’s best practices in automation, IaC and DevOps, bringing Booking.com a step closer to their cloud native goal. 

Results and Benefits

The time to build new environments is drastically reduced from several days to less than an hour. The building process is much more robust and fault tolerant, lowering the cost of implementing new features, solving issues and making changes to the platform. This solution significantly increases scalability, manageability and agility of the IT landscape.

About Sue

Sue is a leading European provider of cloud native services and technologies from the core. We ensure that business applications and company processes merge seamlessly together in the cloud.

Sue provides the best solution for your cloud journey and ensures your workforce is ready for cloud native, DevOps, and Agile practices. Our cloud native experts follow the latest technical developments and are continuously looking to improve and immerse themselves in interesting tech applications. Our customers expect premium services and the most advanced technological solutions.