Founded in 2014 in Berlin, Germany, the company operates local apps and websites in 25 countries across Europe, North America, South America, Australia and Asia-Pacific, listing millions of offers from thousands of trusted partners. HomeToGo also operates brands such as Agriturismo.it, AMIVAC, Casamundo, CaseVacanza.it, e-domizil, EscapadaRural, Kurzurlaub, Kurz Mal Weg, Tripping.com and Wimdu.
The search services HomeToGo offers are underpinned by Elasticsearch, a part of HomeToGo’s operations. However, managing the world’s largest selection of vacation rentals while accommodating a rapidly growing user base is operationally complex with a technology primarily designed for search use cases. Challenges have included managing hundreds of servers and scaling the infrastructure multiple times daily, without straining system performance.
To alleviate operational overhead and improve the user experience, HomeToGo’s engineers opted to update its architecture by decoupling price and availability data storage from search functionality, continuing to use Elasticsearch for search while adopting a different technology for data storage. The company chose Aerospike due to its speed and reliability. The solution uses Aerospike to manage data from HomeToGo’s suppliers and to cache query results in Aerospike for repeated searches. This approach significantly reduces the load on the Elasticsearch infrastructure by decreasing both the data volume stored in Elasticsearch and the workload, as cached data is returned for similar queries.
Achieving sustainability and improved cloud economics with Aerospike
HomeToGo immediately noticed that it could not only easily support customer traffic levels, but that the efficiency metric week-on-week server hours decreased. Other benefits experienced include:
- Improved cloud consumption – Between January and November 2023, HomeToGo experienced 37% fewer server hours consumed.
- Reduced data storage server clusters – To support the high traffic numbers during peak season, HomeToGo only needs eight Aerospike servers per cluster, which drops to six in off-peak.
- Reduced Elasticsearch cluster size by 50% by integrating Aerospike.
One additional benefit of the migration to Aerospike was its ability to handle new hardware resources, such as the next generation of AWS instance types, which ultimately improved price and availability response times.
“The travel business is fundamentally about price and availability which needs to be fast and reliable,” said Audrius Bugas, Technology Director – Architecture, at HomeToGo. “Aerospike’s ability to operate very well under pressure while improving our search response times has made it an invaluable partner in the future growth of our business. And with the significant reduction that we have experienced in server hours…that’s sustainability.”