Overview

Sabre Content Services for Lodging (CSL) is an industry-first technology solution that integrates multi-source, multi-representation of Global Distribution System (GDS), aggregator, and agency-sourced hotel content into the Sabre GDS. The lodging APIs enable Sabre customers to access over a million property options. They also ensure a more consistent shopping experience, down to the room and rate level, offering new data normalization and capabilities. Aggregator sources (including Booking.com, Expedia Partner Solutions and Bedsonline) make up for 90+% of the global inventory in lodging, in addition to the current rich GDS inventory. With over million shopping requests /day, CSL platform is in a significant adoption path by customers. Every major customer cutover demands review of our capacity and plan for any potential increase in capacity. This typically can mean procuring and provisioning of additional hardware; leading to significant overheads in cost, time and effort. Therefore, optimizing system resource usage and achieving high throughput on existing hardware becomes a necessity not only from a cost savings perspective but also from an engineering perspective.

Challenge

Finding ways to significantly and consistently optimize system resource usage, while leveraging current hardware resources to achieve high throughput.

What Sabre did

The members of Team Turbochargers did a detailed performance analysis (CPU and memory profiling) on a few key components of the platform and identified a wonderful enhancement that could be implemented in the design of parallel processing using camel routes. Without this enhancement there was high CPU usage, impacting the application performance, causing high response times for APIs, and reducing throughput (TPS). With the new design changes the team brought in the system, Sabre was able to significantly reduce the CPU usage and improve the TPS leading to further free space that allowed for additional capacity building. SuperBlitzcode 2020 to the rescue. Team Turbochargers blazes a new trail! Team Turbochargers was 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). The team applied the design change/optimization to 3 components in the CSL platform, and the changes were quickly productionized. This enabled the CSL platform to support significantly enhanced capacity without adding expensive hardware. Some of the key approaches to the solution included:
  • Optimized application performance by enabling Streaming while parallel processing Camel sub routes
  • Implemented changes for response processing to be independent of the order of responses from the sub routes
  • Solution applied for multiple APIs in 3 CSL components.

Results:

  • Reduction in CPU utilization by 48% thereby increasing the throughput (TPS) by 61% on an average across the three applications.
  • Savings in hardware requirements in the order of millions of dollars
  • Reduced operational overhead for Operations Team, due to less production servers to manage (provisioning, patching, monitoring, alert management etc.)
  • Reduced release time and effort for dev teams
  • Publishing a whitepaper