In this presentation, Brian Zimmer, Senior Architect at Orbitz World Wide, unveils Orbitz.com’s architecture and its evolution over the years as the site grew from a US domestic flights booking website to an international website offering flight booking, accommodation, car rental, cruises, vacations, and event booking.
Watch: An Architecture's Response to Growth and Change (50 min.)
Brian presents the architecture of Orbitz.com, how it started and how it developed over the years. The architecture grew organically with the website, undergoing many change to keep up with new requirements. Orbitz.com started in 2000 as a US domestic flights booking website, but expanded over time to offer worldwide point-of-sales and booking of international flights. The architecture improved to be able to deal with different currencies, multiple time-zones, internationalization and various services.
One of the most challenging aspects of the new architecture was dealing with multiple not fully reliable service providers. Orbitz.com does not provide the flights, the hotel accommodation, etc., by itself, but it rather aggregates the services offered by other providers. Brian presents some of the difficulties encountered and the solutions adopted to make Orbitz.com run smoothly while serving millions of customers.
