Quest at Oracle OpenWorld 2019: Hotwire presentation

So my name is Val. And we have also Kamal. Yeah, hey-a, hey. This is Kamal. So we are from Hotwire.com and we have a story to tell today. The story relates to how we use SharePlex in our company. And the key points of this story is our migration from data center to the cloud. So when we say data center, anytime I'm going to say data center, I mean our data center at San Jose. And the cloud is a AWS West region US-West one. So there are many companies today migrating to the cloud. We are one of them. I thinks that there is one key differentiator the way we did our migration compared to other companies I've seen out there. Before putting the presentation together, I went out and searched how other companies did their migration. Everybody was claiming zero downtime, near-zero downtime, minimum downtime. I went into their presentation, and always, I found a little key piece, which was indicated that indeed, there was a little brief moment when the traffic had to be switched from one data center to another. So I was able to debunk any migration out there, whether you see AWS Migration System, with using their tool they built for migrating databases. Our key differentiator is that, from the customer perspective, the migration itself of the full application stack happened totally transparently. So that's the story I'm going to tell. Hotwire is in the business for close to 20 years now. The first booking was done in August, 2000. We are part of Expedia group. So there are many brands within Expedia, Hotwire is one of those. We are the only brand within Expedia which sells what we call hotrate. Hotrate is a hotel where you do not know the hotel name before you book. But we reveal the name after we book. And we do that so you can make great savings. Basically, we hide the hotel name, so you can book a always more expensive hotel than you would book on the retail. You would ask why just hotels don't sell on the half price? Just because, if you, for example, knew that a Hilton cost, instead of $400, only $200, you would never go buy on retail. You would always go buy on 20, so they would not make as many revenue as majority. Where Hotwire comes in, if there are unsold rooms on a given day, they come to Hotwire to sell the unsold rooms. Otherwise, it's unsold rooms. So they gave the rooms to Hotwire at real great rates, which typically goes 30% to 40%. We do have not only hotels. We sell car and vacations. So today, we have many searches done on our site, many bookings. And I think that's why the zero downtime is the key differentiator of this migration. Just because, imagine if you had to take downtime to switch your traffic from one data center to another. Then, you incur downtime. It includes the business outage, and you incur a loss. On top of it, not only that you migrate forward, because you are migrating to a new application stack, you have a new installations of many software stack on the EC2 machines, new networking. More often, you incur also problems, and there are chances you will have to roll back. So any time we say, it's zero downtime, it's not only zero downtime rolling forward, but rolling backwards. I'll touch on details how many times we had to go back and forth before we found the destination, the target cloud stack absolutely perfect. But we did it many times. So zero downtime is really the key. So my role at the company is senior data architect. Kamal is the manager of the DBA group. They did the heavy lifting of configuring SharePlex, installing the software. And you will see what it involves, as far as making it all happen zero downtime. The talking points today are a little system overview. We'll talk about the migration approach. Then we're going to talk what does it mean to have an active-active data center? Then we're going to touch on the very core of this approach, which is the bidirectional replication. When we say bidirectional, you may find in the SharePlex documentation, it's peer-to-peer replication or master-master replication. So we're not talking about a master read-only. This is a pure active-active, which means both data centers take a read and write. There are challenges coming with this. And that's where I would like to spend most of my time, which is related to conflict resolutions. For example, what happens if a customer searches for the same hotel room, same destination, what happens if we happen to book the same room in two data center stacks? What happens if the customer comes in and updates his first name on both data centers? So these are real challenges we have to solve along the way. So the challenges and conflict resolution is the very core of this migration effort. The active-active, as I said before, it's mainly due for that we can roll the traffic forward and roll the traffic backwards. The benefits, you would think that it's for eliminating downtime, meaning continuous availability. But I would actually precede that with reducing risk is the number one, I think, benefit of zero downtime. Meaning when you come and create a new complete software stack. and move 100% traffic of customers to the new data center, you may experience any performance issues in anywhere, starting in the application servers down to the database. You will have to roll back the traffic. Now, if you did not do it with zero downtime, you would have to incur downtime going forward. Then you run into performance issues, or some application-level issues-- that's the second problem. Third problem is taking the traffic back again. So not only that, if you will look closely, if you roll back, then you hav