The Challenge
Ryanair’s booking engine ryanair.com is critical to the business, so stability and resilience are vital. The site and app experienced 1 billion visits in 2018.
Without the website, the company would have planes to fly but no passengers. As well as handling very high volumes of traffic, the website experiences significant spikes in demand and needed to continue to do this as the airline expands, adds new routes and grows customers.
Ryanair works closely with Presidio which supplies Ryanair with its Citrix technology.
The Solution
Ryanair uses NetScaler’s Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) functionality to manage load-balancing within each data centre. so that traffic can be shared across all three, reducing the number of servers required.
When a marketing promotion requires a dedicated URL or to re-direct an existing address, the team quickly accommodates this using NetScaler’s custom re-write and responder-rules in just 20 minutes. This might otherwise take two or three hours of developers’ time.
Typically, Ryanair’s data centres are configured as one active, one passive and one spare. When deploying changes to the website, the team uses NetScaler to switch between data centres or between banks of servers, enabling updates to be made in an agile fashion, with no site downtime, whilst always having a roll-back version as back-up.
" Without the website we may have planes ready to fly but would have no paying customers. Therefore, stability and resilience are vital. As well as handling very high volumes of traffic, the website also experiences significant spikes in demand during promotions. "Declan Costello, Head of Infrastructure, Ryanair
The Presidio difference
- Managing load-balancing within each data centre to handle large volumes of website traffic
- No site downtime while deploying changes to the website
- Effectively supporting Ryanair's booking engine, which experiences around 1 billion visits annually
