How SERVICE-REISEN Modernized a 30-Year-Old Travel Platform with Traefik Hub

Company Profile

SERVICE-REISEN
51–250 Employees
Travel Services
Bottighofen, Switzerland

Challenge

SERVICE-REISEN is a Swiss and German based family-owned B2B travel services company that organizes complete tour packages (including hotels, ferries, restaurants, and sightseeing) for bus companies across Europe. Behind the scenes, approximately 170 employees rely on a business-critical platform built on InterSystems IRIS that has supported the company's operations for more than thirty years.

While the platform had proven highly reliable over decades of operation, evolving business requirements and modern development practices highlighted the need for a more flexible architecture. Every deployment, regardless of size, required approximately twenty minutes of planned downtime and a company-wide announcement. In addition, each restart temporarily degraded application performance, sometimes for several days, making frequent releases impractical.

With SERVICE-REISEN operating a 24/7 emergency hotline for travel customers, application availability was not simply an IT concern; it was essential to maintaining business continuity. The company therefore needed an approach that would allow it to modernize its technology landscape while continuing to support day-to-day operations without interruption.

As part of this broader modernization effort, the company also sought to simplify and standardize its API landscape. Existing services had evolved over time with different authentication approaches and separate entry points. SERVICE-REISEN wanted to establish a consistent API management layer that would centralize authentication, improve governance, and provide a scalable foundation for future application development.

Previous Approach

Recognizing that its core platform would continue to evolve over the coming years,  SERVICE-REISEN launched a phased modernization program. Rather than replacing its long-running business application in a single step, the company focused on building a modern cloud-native platform around it. This included introducing Kubernetes, containerizing the existing application, and implementing standardized observability, automation, and security capabilities. These investments established a strong foundation for modern application delivery while allowing the business to continue operating without disruption.As the platform matured, SERVICE-REISEN identified the need for enterprise-grade API management to support the next stage of its modernization journey. The goal was to centralize authentication, standardize API exposure, strengthen governance, and simplify operations across both existing and newly developed services.

Solution

SERVICE-REISEN selected Traefik Hub API Gateway as the natural next step in its modernization strategy. Existing Traefik Proxy deployments can be upgraded to Traefik Hub API Gateway, in place, which gives SERVICE-REISEN the centralized API management capabilities needed to support the next phase of their modernization. The additional capabilities include unified authentication through Microsoft Entra ID, secure API exposure under a single domain, policy-based access control, traffic management, HTTP caching, and integrated observability. And because Traefik Hub uses the same Kubernetes-native CRD-based configuration model, the company was able to extend its existing platform while preserving established operational workflows.

Implementation

Traefik’s seamless upgrade path from Proxy to API Gateway enabled SERVICE-REISEN to implement Traefik Hub quickly with only minimal changes to the underlying platform. This allowed the company to preserve its existing configuration and deployment architecture while introducing enterprise API management capabilities.

The platform remained fully integrated with SERVICE-REISEN existing GitOps and observability ecosystem. The team continued managing infrastructure declaratively while gaining enhanced visibility into API traffic and platform performance. The company also evaluated additional capabilities, including secrets management and a developer portal, to support future expansion of its API ecosystem.

Traefik Hub was introduced into production during Q1 2026. The technical migration was completed within a matter of days, with production rollout following after internal validation and testing.

Result

The adoption of Traefik Hub marked an important milestone in the SERVICE-REISEN application modernization journey. By centralizing authentication, API management, and security policies at the platform level, the engineering team was able to focus on developing new business capabilities instead of implementing common infrastructure functionality within each individual service. As SERVICE-REISEN continues transitioning from its long-running monolithic application toward a modern microservices architecture, the platform provides a consistent foundation for securely exposing APIs, simplifying operations, and supporting future growth.Enterprise support also contributed to the long-term sustainability of the modernization program. During a subsequent team transition, Traefik's support team helped onboard the new platform administrator, ensuring continuity and minimizing operational risk while the company continued its transformation.Today, deployments can be performed during normal business hours without requiring company-wide downtime announcements, giving development teams greater flexibility to release changes more frequently. Routine deployments no longer require planned application downtime or the temporary performance degradation that had previously affected internal users.

"Modernizing a business-critical platform that has supported our operations for more than thirty years is an ongoing journey,” explained Head of IT Vasil Vasilev. “Our goal was to introduce modern API management and security while continuing to operate the business without disruption. Traefik Hub fit naturally into that strategy, allowing us to build on the platform we had already established rather than replacing it. Enterprise support provides the confidence to continue evolving the platform as our business and engineering organization grow."

Today, SERVICE-REISEN continues to modernize its business-critical platform incrementally, adopting cloud-native technologies while maintaining uninterrupted operations for employees, partners, and customers.