“Confluent enables an event-driven architecture that improves efficiency for software engineering. Adopting data streaming opens up numerous, valuable use cases by bringing insights closer to the analysts.”
Maxim Foursa
Senior Engineering Manager, Booking.com
Booking.com is one of the world’s largest online travel agencies, helping customers find accommodation, flights, car rentals, and activities with ease. Serving 220 countries, in 45 languages, its mobile app is the most downloaded travel agency app globally.
An expanding global customer base brings more data. Booking.com realized the value of data streaming early on—it enabled the site to provide customers with a seamless booking experience and allowed more teams to drive value by leveraging analytical workflows. While data streaming was becoming more important, however, the operational effort to support the homegrown solution was increasing. The company’s self-managed deployment of Apache Kafka required significant resources to maintain, especially as the demands of the business continued to grow.
Technical Solution
Booking.com needed a data streaming solution that would meet their needs today and support effortless scalability in the future. The team chose Confluent Platform and transitioned each business unit’s clusters onto the data streaming platform. Adopting this enterprise-ready software provided Booking.com with better reliability and enhanced out-of-the-box functionality for data management. At the same time, this transition also paves the way for future cloud migration due to the solution’s cloud-native architecture.
Business Results
Historically, Booking.com invested heavily in its own data streaming platform, dedicating extensive resources to its engineering. Since transitioning to Confluent Platform, the travel agency has streamlined development, freeing up resources to prioritize innovation with data.
Enabled by Confluent, Booking.com is deploying a “connected trip” experience, allowing customers to seamlessly book flights, accommodations, car rentals, and experiences in one visit. Data streaming with Confluent has also facilitated analytical and personalization workflows.
Other teams, such as those in finance and data security, have also benefited from having access to well-governed data products created on Confluent Platform, further extending the realized business value of data streaming for the organization.
The Future
Having already fully migrated from open source Kafka to Confluent Platform, the next step is to transition to the public cloud. Maxim Foursa, Senior Engineering Manager at Booking.com, said that cloud migration “will serve as a significant enabler for integration and development acceleration.”
The world is opening up to more people faster than ever. And, with Confluent’s help, Booking.com is set to help the world feel like a smaller, more connected place.
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