Expedia Simplifies Network Management by Deploying Traefik as Preferred Reverse Proxy

Overview

Expedia Group is one of the world’s largest travel platforms. Its platform – covering all aspects of the travel experience such as hotels, flights, car rental, and vacation homes – is managed by a number of infrastructure teams that comprise hundreds of engineers across Expedia Group’s expansive portfolio of businesses and brands. Ensuring transactions run smoothly is a monumental task, given the sheer scale of Expedia Group’s business and the diversity of applications and technologies in use.

Challenge

Like many large companies, Egencia, an Expedia Group brand, has a broad range of applications with dependencies on specific tools and platforms, including containerization solutions. The infrastructure team was managing a multitude of container platforms, each requiring a unique networking configuration and runtime to operate. This made management of these environments difficult and time-consuming, as each network change needed to be applied individually for each environment.

The team set out to find a proxy solution flexible enough to work across multiple platforms – such as Consul, Mesos, and Kubernetes – while integrating natively with each platform’s unique discovery mechanisms and information models. What they needed was a single reverse proxy solution that could standardize and consolidate the existing, disparate solutions to reduce operational overhead, simplify new deployments, and minimize human errors during configuration changes. Given the organization’s size, the “perfect” solution would need to meet specific requirements around scalability, ease and speed of deployment, and function efficiently in highly dynamic, containerized environments.

Solution

Egencia’s infrastructure team began working with Traefik while evaluating and testing different solutions in the networking landscape of the containerized world.

Traefik offered the ability for engineering teams to plug in multiple environments such as Mesos, Marathon, Consul, and so on – all with the use of a single tool. Traefik’s wide array of pluggable providers allows it to connect to any compatible configuration source, presenting a unified and consistent platform for traffic routing. This feature appealed greatly, because it addressed the complexity of the company’s heterogeneous environment.

“You can bring in one proxy, plug it into five different data sources, and say, ‘Voilà, we’re done.’ People who have to manage infrastructure appreciate such flexibility and convenience.” – Alex Antonov, Distinguished Engineer, Expedia Group

Ultimately, Egencia’s engineering team chose Traefik for its simplicity and ease of maintenance and configuration. Traefik is a lean implementation, written in Go. It ships as a single binary, which makes it easy to deploy. It offers extensive configuration options that are suitable for any application scenario and scale, and with its advanced routing capabilities, Traefik was one of the only solutions capable of easily configuring multiple advanced routes per service and running custom configuration templates.

“If none of the out-of-the-box things work, you can roll your own custom configuration template completely written from scratch. For us, that’s a definite value add. Being able to do custom hooks or definitions for your stack is important.” – Alex Antonov, Distinguished Engineer, Expedia Group

By standardizing on Traefik as Egencia’s reverse proxy of choice across all environments, the engineering team simplified network operation management, which improved productivity.

Expedia Group is committed to supporting and encouraging the values of open source throughout the organization. As an open source project, Traefik demonstrates Expedia Group’s commitment to consume and contribute to open source software as part of the greater community. The company’s infrastructure team found the Traefik developer community to be responsive, receptive, and collaborative, which they value highly.

“One of the advantages of Traefik is the interaction with the developers. It feels like an open source family.” – Alex Antonov, Distinguished Engineer, Expedia Group

With Traefik as its preferred reverse proxy solution, Egencia achieved increased delivery speed at scale, even in the rapidly evolving container ecosystem.

Bottom Line

Traefik met Egencia’s requirements throughout the evaluation process, proving its ability to handle the most demanding workloads in high traffic environments. Equally important, Egencia’s infrastructure team benefits from increased simplicity when managing large-scale containerized infrastructure, not to mention ease of maintenance due to the critical features Traefik delivers to this unique environment.

“Traefik pretty much supports itself. There isn’t much support that we require, things just work. I absolutely recommend Traefik.” – Alex Antonov, Distinguished Engineer, Expedia Group