Qarik

Case Studies

Global Reservation Platform

Strategic Challenge

Our client practically invented their space within the global travel industry. Their mainframe-based, high-volume / low-latency applications are trusted by millions of people daily to book travel. Our client’s mainframe environment housing these applications performed well, but became harder and harder to adapt. Change became especially problematic in the context of a rapidly evolving ecosystem of customers and competitors.

Our client entered into a multi-year strategic partnership with Google to move 100% of their IT Estate in GCP in an effort to modernize / transform themselves to take advantage of what cloud-native offers.

Our client has a global footprint: ~5,000 engineers spread across ~500 engineering teams, and several continents and underlying cultures. This size, and their long and proud history of strong engineering made transformation a daunting challenge.

The Process

We were brought in to help reimagine the process for getting software written for the cloud and deployed to the cloud, with an eye towards simultaneously optimizing for:

  • Developer Productivity
    • Automating as much as possible
    • Maximize reuse between teams
  • Security, especially in light of massive supply chain ransomware attacks

Specifically Qarik worked with our client to help design, build, and “sell” a new CI/CD system based on a monorepo and Bazel (software build technology from Google). We combined our capabilities (experience and expertise in both general DevOps principles, specific content knowledge about GCP) with the client team’s domain and organizational knowledge.

We started small, but aimed big. We segmented client engineering teams along several dimensions and ended with early adopter teams, then focused relentlessly on making them successful with the new systems. Simultaneously we went on several executive “roadshows” to understand and align our efforts to the VP+ engineering leaders' thinking.

The Result

  • A strong, and growing user community for the CI/CD “product” that now helps support each other. We are even seeing teams contribute back to the system, in an “internal open source” manner. Exactly what we were hoping for.
  • Our client stated that our project has amongst the strongest ROI of the entire migration program, as we are now beginning to see an acceleration in both technical and cultural transformation.