Awaze cuts web costs by a third in record year after Rackspace cloud migration

Awaze cuts web costs by a third in record year after Rackspace cloud migration

The multi-cloud tech services firm oversaw self-catering specialist’s move to Amazon Web Services

Picture: The Awaze offices at WeWork in Dalton Place, Manchester. credit: Lee Boswell

Self-catering specialist group Awaze says it has seen a 30% reduction in web session costs due its shift to cloud technology which supported record demand this year.

The cottages.com, James Villa Holidays and Hoseasons parent, partnered with Rackspace to make the shift from on-premises tech to Amazon Web Services prior to the pandemic.

The firm says the multi-cloud strategy adopted by Rackspace is paying dividends as demand for domestic holidays soared while international travel restrictions were in place during COVID.

The firm, which offers 90,000 accommodation choices in 36 countries to more than six million holidaymakers a year, reported unprecedented surges in demand over the last 12 months.

Awaze is a group of companies that used to come under the Wyndham Vacation Rentals group before the hospitality giant sold them to Vacasa in 2019.

Awaze said it has only been able to meet the huge volumes of traffic to its Hoseasons and cottages.com websites at points this year due to its transition to AWS.

James Baird, Technical Operations Director at Awaze said: “Our partnership with Rackspace Technology has allowed us to optimise our cloud footprint and make it elastic at every layer and across every point of the customer and owner journey.

“This means it seamlessly expands and contracts in line with volatile patterns of demand, maintaining robustly consistent response times and performance whilst also being highly commercially optimised.

“Prior to this investment we had to maintain compute resources at peak levels most of the time.

“We already had multi-dimensional cycles influencing patterns of demand, including time of day and time of year, but the pandemic completely disrupted these resulting in huge spikes and troughs.

“Auto-scaling means we no longer have to waste resource to cope with market volatility and can service demand in the most efficient, cost-effective way possible whilst maintaining performance and delivering a great experience for our guests and owners.”

The new cloud technology faced its toughest tests on February 21 when web traffic increased 400% immediately after UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s route out of lockdown address to parliament.

Traffic peaked at one booking and nearly 100 searches every second, with the number of CPUs powering the company’s guest and owner portals going from less than 100 to more than 1,200 in less than six hours.

Simon Bennett, chief technology officer EMEA at Rackspace Technology, said: “Awaze has been a valued customer for over 12 years and we’re proud to have been part of its digital evolution.

“With auto-scaling and flexibility being key components of public cloud environments, Awaze can benefit from increased innovation and agility in support of their own business objectives.”

Awaze and Rackspace are continuing to migrate all of the firm’s remaining applications hosted in non-cloud data centres into the AWS cloud.

It expects that this will deliver “unparalleled flexibility, near limitless scalability and performance and enable the company to continue its growth journey, both organically and through M&A activity”.