The Highlights

• Enabled comprehensive tracking of operational metrics and logging while adding over 1.2 svcs/month.
• Supported container diagnostics.
• Brought down deployment/conversion time to under 24 hours.
• Delivered pivot potential for building new services and migrating data centers.

The Customer

LateRooms is the UK’s leading online accommodation site, offering hotel deals in every corner of the UK plus in over 200,000 properties worldwide. The company’s core operation aims to connect people with good hotel deals and provide discount rates for bed-and-breakfasts and hotels.

Using a robust set of direct connections with hospitalities businesses, LateRooms has been able to showcase lodging options in an attractive way while handling scheduling and more on a user-friendly platform. However, one place where the company ran into challenges was in their hardware environment.

The Challenge

A need for resource allocation and tool management led LateRooms to move toward a microservices framework. Developer teams were having a difficult time maintaining consistent functionality across the board with malfunctions and other obstacles disrupting system administration.

The company also had to deal with the complexity of the expanding number of available environments for codebase projects. Growth created a kind of chaos that led to engineers struggling with application service support. LateRooms sought automation to allow the pipeline to move and expand more quickly. Orchestration for containers was a key part of migrating to a more agile model.

“Automation has always been key to our teams. It’s been a big part of our culture and engineering. Rancher has helped support us with that.”

Steve Elliott, Head of Engineering

The Result

LateRooms chose Rancher in order to provide a top management layer for container deployment, which in turn helped the company solve a lot of its workflow and pipeline issues. Good container setups offer the ability to effectively manage containers, which are in and of themselves a big step forward from trying to manage virtual machines. That’s partly because of threats like virtual machine sprawl, and the innovative build of containers where a shared operating system is cloned for each individual unit presenting both efficiency and a smaller attack surface.

LateRooms’ fix with Rancher is based on the ease-of-use of the container management platform, which combines container orchestration with other necessary tools, making deployments transparent. By bringing consistency to the process of automation and container management, Rancher helped LateRooms move core systems toward a new environment, one that can help handle projects in a more efficient way.

“Rancher has allowed us a whole new way of looking at how we get the tools into a lifelike state and into an environment where we can really reuse them in other ways.”

Steve Elliott, Head of Engineering