BAS – a file administration system for travel agencies – was hosted on premise until recently.
Fadiro, is responsible for purchasing, maintenance and management of the physical machines and software development. There was one employee responsible for setting up and managing the infrastructure and deployments. When this employee decided to change jobs, Fadiro decided not to be dependent on one single person anymore.
Fadiro approached us for the migration to the Microsoft Azure Cloud and Implement Azure DevOps. Sounds like an interesting story? Read more;
The situation
Fadiro has developed the web-based application BAS. BAS is the file administration system for travel agencies in the Netherlands. More than 90% of the ANVR travel specialists in the Netherlands use their system.
When customers book a trip a travel specialist can handle the entire administration in BAS. Think of extensive profile registration, links with the visa center, car rental companies and vaccination specialists and a correspondence module. Financial data is automatically transferred from BAS to an external accounting package. The customers have a portal on mijnreisoverzicht.nl where they can find everything about their trip and also manage things like payment.
Fadiro started 18 years ago and has always been a very innovative company in the field of IT. The switch to the Cloud was a logical next step.
The challenge
Until two years ago, Fadiro only used an on-premise environment spread across the data centers of two hosting parties. The physical machines were purchased, configured, installed and managed by Fadiro.
The knowledge about the design and management of these machines was entrusted to a single employee. This employee spent a large part of his day on system management and server maintenance.
In addition, maintenance on the servers had to be done outside office hours to prevent interruptions on the customer's side. This also applied to the software updates. Once a month, on Sunday evening, an employee had to run the updates which sometimes contained up to 20 new features. This method resulted in the situation where new updates were ready but for a long period of time but couldn’t be shipped as they had to wait for the maintenance window.
Over time, Fadiro signed up more and more customers and therefore had to manage more data which resulted in performance challenges. With the current infrastructure scaling was very difficult
Time for improvement, Fadiro thought. The moment the employee, responsible for the infrastructure got a different job, they decided to switch to the Cloud. They ended up at Intercept through the partner channel.
The solution
We helped Fadiro with the migration to the Azure Cloud. The first transition consisted of exchanging computers for virtual machines, a lift and shift.
We then implemented Azure DevOps, an environment in which the development team can quickly implement updates through automated pipelines and manage their backlog. The combination with Kubernetes - the well-known container orchestration system - means that every feature can be updated immediately without the customer being affected.
Fadiro is now purchasing Managed Services from us. With extensive monitoring we keep a close eye on topics such as user experience and security. We perform a monthly evaluation of the system, in which we discuss options for taking the environment to a higher level, focused on innovation.
The results
- The time to implement new features shortened from a few weeks to a few minutes. Customer requests and bug fixes can be picked up immediately. With Kubernetes, these updates are implemented without the customer noticing any downtime.
- The purchase and maintenance costs of physical machines are high. By using virtual machines and Kubernetes, Fadiro saves on these costs. Furthermore, Fadiro can easily scale up and down. A monitoring tool provides insight into the usage, and gives them the possibility to add virtual machines with a click of the button.
- Because all virtual machines and containers are taken from the same script, extensive knowledge of the infrastructure by Fadiro is no longer necessary. The Fadiro programmers can fully focus on the development of the application.