Overview
Sabre’s Visual Content Management Platform (VCMP) provides real time visual content to customers from the hospitality, car rental, cruise and airline industries. This platform handles several million media content for many properties and serves the traffic at an average response time of 40 milliseconds. Being platform-agnostic, it offers seamless connectivity with diverse applications, and a host of utilitarian features such as real-time resizing of images and seamless distribution.
Challenge
One of the pain points of VCMP was that there were several methods for deleting obsolete images from the platform which was proving to be complex and expensive. As the delete functionality of cloud image provider is an admin API , the lack of unified approach for deletion of images lead to piling up of unused images incurring more cost to the company.
The challenge was to avoid duplication of code and create seamless extensibility to Line of Business (LoB), while creating an automated deletion system that would reduce 3
rd party expenses.
What Sabre did
After brainstorming, the Wunderkind team came up with idea to create a single logic to delete all the unused images from VCMP, and across all the acquisition jobs. They also identified ways to control ad-hoc and unnecessary requests to cloud image provider. The team leveraged Single Responsibility Design principle to solve the above challenge.
SuperBlitzcode 2020 to the rescue. Team Wunderkind makes a breakthrough!
Team Wunderkind, a participating team in
SuperBlitzcode 2020 (The latest edition of the yearly 3-day hackathon at Sabre’s Global Development Center, that aims to solve key business challenges facing the travel industry), came up with the right solution to reduce their tech debt and plug the gap on the extra cloud image provider bills. They also ensured to make this extensible to any new LoB seamlessly.
Team Wunderkind worked with the Product Management team (VCMP in Lodging Ground & Sea) to prioritize the new feature into the product RoadMap and delivered it to Production in a very short span of time leading to
customer delight!
Some of the key approaches to the solution included:
- A single logic to delete all obsolete images
- A single code base that allows plug-and-play across LOBs
- Usage of the same logic for all acquisition jobs
- Applying this logic to delete images from cloud image provider
- Controlling ad-hoc requests and restricting unnecessary requests to cloud image provider
Results
- Savings on cloud image provider bill
- Ease of adding new lines of business
- Lesser overheads while modifying the functionality
- Ease in maintaining the code