Virgin Holidays Core Systems virginholidays.co.uk

Most Loved.

The internal systems at Virgin Holidays support the core sales activities, and have to be performant and be built to stand up to peak periods of activities.

They also have be be easy to use, nice to work with and make the hard parts of everyday sales and support easier.

As part of an ambitious project to bring the internal systems in line with the modern systems built for the external web, the core systems team have started by building the most loved selling platform for the sales and retail functions of the business.

New Approach.

As a new technical lead, joining an established team, it's often hard to balance the need for continued progress, with the necessary trans-formative changes, that are inevitably needed to bring better thinking and practices to the engineering process.

The team were open to change, and had already started to think about new ways of working. My role has been to help the team adopt more agile ways of managing their workload, whilst also supporting the adoption of new technologies.

Solid Foundations.

With the help of the team, we designed a scalable and powerful platform.

The remit was to keep costs down whilst being able to grow the capabilities of the platform whilst being able to handle spikes in demand.

It was clear to us that a serverless stack would help us to achieve this. Using microservices paradigm.

Selling Platform.

Our choice was to use Amazon's AWS service as the backbone to our micro-service architecture.

Our front-end applications, built in Angular, React or without JS frameworks can co-exist independently, built with CodePipeline, deployed to Amazon S3, and served by CloudFront and secured for internal use only, these applications are fast, reliable and can be quickly iterated with new features.

The back-end consists of Lambda processes, that talk to one another via restful interfaces, or using SNS. Again, built, tested and deployed using CodePipeline, and presented via private API Gateway endpoints.