Riding on Cloud

style="font-weight: normal;">redBus
is India's largest travel agent that specializes in bus travel
throughout India. Tickets are purchased through the company's
website at www.redBus.in, through its distributed call centers or
through the online services of its agents and partners. The company
also offers software on Software as a Service (SaaS) basis, which
gives bus operators the option of handling their own ticketing and
manage their own inventories. Till date, redBus has enabled over 4.5
million passenger seats and has more than 700 bus operators using the
software to manage their operations.

style="font-weight: normal;">Today,
redBus customers have access to information of almost all the
available bus schedules and their availability at a single place. It
enables them to make the right choice while booking. The bus operators
on the other hand benefit by getting access to a large number of
customers through the redBus platform running on Amazon Web Services
(AWS) cloud. redBus has developed its own bus ticketing services
called BOSS directly on AWS cloud platform. The company then migrated
the whole of redBus applications to the AWS within a two and half
month's timeline.

style="font-weight: normal;">The
web scale computing services that AWS offers today are based on
Amazon's own back-end technology infrastructure which they have
spent over a decade building into one of the world's most reliable,
scalable, and cost-efficient web infrastructures. AWS gives any
software developer the keys to this infrastructure, which they can
use to build and grow any business. This makes it possible for any
business to reach the scale of major internet players, but without
the expensive price tag they would have to pay to build and maintain
such a reliable, secure, and scalable infrastructure.

style="font-weight: normal;">After
using one of the traditional data centers for over a year to cater to
the ticketing needs, redBus quickly
ran into issues related to scale, namely-procurement of new
servers, upgrading existing servers and as a result, most of the
developer's time went into circumventing these issues which were
not adding values to its core business. That was when they decided to
try the cloud. “We wanted the developers to focus on developing and
enhancing the application that would improve our offerings to
customers and not spend unproductive time in IT infrastructure,”
said Charan Padmaraju, co-founder and CTO, redBus. “With the cloud,
we do not need to spend capital on any hardware infrastructure or
worry about maintenance. We just need to focus on our core competence
of continuing to enhance our services that enable great user
experience,” he added.

style="font-weight: normal;">Before
opting for the cloud platform by AWS, redBus had a fixed number of
servers with limited capability and was non scalable. “We didn't
have much option in choosing computing resources, configuration and
the type of operating system we want. Moreover, procuring a new
server or upgrading an existing server took more than 2 weeks. For
example, once we wanted to open a port on one of our servers and it
took 2 days. On another occasion, the memory size wasn't enough to
service the work load, the process to upgrade took more than a month
and our business took a hit. That was when we decided that we had
enough of this infrastructure constraint and moved our entire
infrastructure to AWS,” Padmaraju emphasized.

style="font-weight: normal;">Having
run pilot tests and proof of concept, redBus quickly learned and
gained experience on how to operate in the cloud which helped it in
building its cloud strategy in 2009. “Initially we used AWS to
build one of our new SaaS offerings that we delivered to our
customers, the entire process of hosting and managing this service
was so smooth and easy that we decided to move our entire
infrastructure to AWS,” Padmaraju said. However, redBus is
completely on AWS now, which also includes its financial management
applications. Justifying its preference in choosing AWS, Padmaraju
opined that AWS is well equipped with their global scale and years of
experience in handling infrastructure and serving so many customers
of every imaginable scenario. This further led to the belief that AWS
is more secure and reliable than any traditional data center or cloud
providers.

style="font-weight: normal;">Citing
the advantages for opting for AWS as its cloud provider for not only
its ticketing system, but for financial functionality as well,
Padmaraju opined, “The advantage of using AWS cloud is that it is a
pay-asyou- go system. There is no upfront commitment and no
maintenance contract that lock us in. The AWS team is very responsive
to customers and we are happy with their services. In addition, we
like the fact that AWS listens to customer's feedback, and their
pace of innovation is quick and frequent.”

“ style="font-weight: normal;">After
moving to AWS, our traffic has increased hugely, by 3 fold. We are
now able to launch multiple products for bus operators on SaaS model.
This is possible only in a cloud platform due to its elasticity and
scalability. AWS has also given us an overall cost benefit of about
30 to 40%,” he added. Citing some of the more tangible benefits
arising of the cloud implementation by AWS, redBus claimed that they
no longer need to wait because of capability limitations associated
with a traditional data center. Further, AWS has enabled the
developers of redBus to focus on building applications according to
its changing business needs and differentiate the customer offerings,
as compared to the old world model whereby the developers were
spending unproductive time making changes to the applications in
order to accommodate the traditional data center's limited
capabilities. “We loved the fact that AWS has eliminated all the
hassles of IT management like server evaluation and procurement,
vendor evaluation and management, operation work like hardware
refresh and maintenance, database backups, restoration, fault
tolerance among others. Whenever we need to start a project or
experiment with any idea, we simply scale up our required server
capacity, then scale it down whenever we don't need it and the
beauty is that we pay only for what we actually use,” a happy
Padmaraju concluded.