Amadeus and Google Cloud: transforming travel technology platforms together

April 16, 2019

Last updated: April 16, 2019

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We live in a time of great change, a time of transformation. Technology is no longer used to simply make things faster, cheaper and more reliable. It is being used to redefine industries, enabling new types of value to be generated and new types of services to be delivered.

One industry that is being redefined by technology is travel. Technology is providing personalized convenience and choice for travelers, making it ever easier to decide where to go, how to get there, where to stay and what to do once there. And the platforms that make all of this possible have to transform too. The adoption of Cloud Computing, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are enabling greater personalization, providing higher levels of service - improved scaling, performance, resilience, and flexibility, and unleashing innovation.

Being able to play a part in this transformation is something that I find particularly exciting. And collaborating with Amadeus is a great opportunity for Google Cloud, as we work together to transform the core platforms that underpin the modern travel industry, and drive innovation.

Recently we marked the first milestone in our collaboration, as a number of Googlers and I participated inT3CH, Amadeus’ first technology event focused on Transforming Tomorrow's Travel . During this two day event, we were able to meet and engage with a host of technology leaders in the travel industry, learning about their needs and opportunities, and shared our thoughts and perspectives. It was also here that Amadeus and Google Cloud publiclyannounced the deployment of Amadeus’ core shopping application, Master Pricer, on Google Cloud.

Our journey together started a number of years ago. Amadeus was building out its own Cloud infrastructure inside its own data centers, and chose to use Kubernetes based tooling to do so. Kubernetes is an open source platform, originally developed by Google, for the management of containerized applications. It enables the automated deployment, scaling and availability of those applications on pretty much any Cloud - your Cloud in your data center, on Google’s Cloud, or on any other Cloud. Kubernetes has become the de facto platform of choice, enabling one model for managing applications, yet allowing choice as to where you run them. This gave Amadeus a great foundation to build upon in its own data center, and one that gave them choices in the future.

Wind forward a few years, and after lots of great collaboration, Amadeus have built its own open and flexible architecture, and moved its core travel application onto Google Cloud.

This has provided Amadeus with several benefits:

Amadeus is able to deploy instances of its applications nearer to the point of consumption, reducing latency.
Deploying on Google Cloud allows Amadeus to deliver improved resilience by having multiple instances of this part of its core platform deployed in more locations.
Amadeus is able to expand and contract the resources it consumes based on need. It can scale up for predictable events like Black Friday, or unpredictable events like severe weather, and then it can scale back down, without having to pay for the extra capacity it doesn’t need for the rest of the year.

Whilst this is our first visible milestone together, it reflects an ongoing collaboration, as we learn from each other. For us at Google Cloud, Amadeus’s unique applications demand the very best from a Cloud platform in terms of performance, scale and resilience, and thus help improve our own platform.

Google Cloud and Amadeus may have very different roots, but we share a common purpose in using technology to empower the travel ecosystem, and to transform the experience of travelers, improving convenience and choice. Transformation journeys like this are why I joined Google Cloud.

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