Capacitas COO Danny Quilton co-presented in the Virtualisation Infrastructure and Platforms stream at the Cloud Expo Europe 2013 at the National Hall, Olympia with easyJet Chief Technology Officer, Andy Caddy.
Danny Quilton of Capacitas and Andy Caddy of easyJet presenting on easyJet in the Cloud
The presentation highlighted easyJet’s willingness to embrace new technology, in this case in the form of cloud services, provided by Microsoft Azure. It went on to describe Capacitas’ ability to help easyJet to scale the cloud infrastructure required for this, as well as identifying optimisations which could be implemented in the applications which run on the cloud, to ensure easyJet are receiving the ‘best bang for the buck’.
easyJet has been heavily reliant on its IT Systems for a number of years, and became one of the first low cost airlines in Europe to enable customers to purchase flights through an e-commerce website. Combined with the great value they offer, and assisted by a contract signed with Airbus in 2002, which enabled them to fix the price of aircraft they have purchased over the subsequent 15 years, easyJet have seen massive growth, and this has had a massive impact on and shaped the way they have architected their IT systems.
The presentation demonstrated Capacitas’ involvement in a recent project of easyJet’s, when they added a new service to their e-commerce website which enables customers to select specific seats for their flights.
Danny demonstrated how, primarily through assistance in code refactoring, Capacitas were able to assist easyJet in optimising this application, transforming it from a service which had a throughput of 2 users per second per instance, and requiring 20 instances, into a much leaner application which could handle 50 users per second, requiring only a single instance, and thus enabling easyJet to realise a 15 fold decrease in costs on Microsoft Azure to support this service.
As a second example, Danny also described how, after the application went live, an unexpected and massive increase was seen in the size database at the back end of this service, which is also hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. It transpired that this was due to unoptimised archiving of data, along with ‘scrapers’ from competitors and price comparison websites causing unnecessary database writes. Capacitas helped identify these issues, and gave advice to the easyJet team to mitigate these issues, again resulting in impressive cost savings.
These examples helped reinforce the message that applications in the cloud still require performance testing and performance tuning, and that one should not simply ‘scale up’ without doing these first.
The theatre was packed, with standing room only before the presentation, and proved very popular, with both presenters having a queue of delegates with questions to ask after the session.
