How HotelTonight Scaled Their Stack [audio](stackshare.io)
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How HotelTonight Scaled Their Stack [audio]
http://stackshare.io/posts/how-hoteltonight-scaled-their-stack-from-mvp-to-ipo
27 comments
Curious, What are all these companies building that makes scale an issue? I see only CRUD products. At what point does scale become an issue? 1000 concurrent users, 10,000, 100,000?
State? Keeping a single source of truth which changes every 1/100th second while millions of users are doing something to change that state?
Right, but companies like Sabre [1] solved this in the 60s. If its gotten progressively easier over ~55 years, why should we be wowed now that anyone can spin up a travel aggregator that scales (just as I'm not impressed that Simple/BankSimple exists when they ride on top of a real bank, Bancorp; I'm actually deeply disappointed as one of the first Simple customers that ended up leaving because it took 5 years for them to implement joint checking accounts. At a bank). Amazon, airlines, Ticketmaster, all online companies that have to maintain "truth" about shared inventory and its pricing up to the second.
If you're breaking ground, awesome, you're doing something truly revolutionary. Would you be wowed if I built a Shopify clone off of Stripe and Squarespace? Or an app and site that performed ridesharing while simply talking to Uber or Tesla's backend? Probably not.
Ahh! There! Perfect example. I eagerly await the video, with baited breath, of a presentation from the team at Tesla rolling out autonomous driving using Nvidia's deep learning chipset. But if you build another Kayak, Hipmunk, etc, I do give you credit for grinding away on it if its a successful business. Grinding away on a business day after day for years is fucking hard. I'd just argue its not revolutionary or breaking new ground.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_Corporation
Disclaimer: Satisfied HotelTonight app user.
If you're breaking ground, awesome, you're doing something truly revolutionary. Would you be wowed if I built a Shopify clone off of Stripe and Squarespace? Or an app and site that performed ridesharing while simply talking to Uber or Tesla's backend? Probably not.
Ahh! There! Perfect example. I eagerly await the video, with baited breath, of a presentation from the team at Tesla rolling out autonomous driving using Nvidia's deep learning chipset. But if you build another Kayak, Hipmunk, etc, I do give you credit for grinding away on it if its a successful business. Grinding away on a business day after day for years is fucking hard. I'd just argue its not revolutionary or breaking new ground.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_Corporation
Disclaimer: Satisfied HotelTonight app user.
> I'd just argue its not revolutionary or breaking new ground
Which is totally fine and not a prerequisite for a business or tech business
Which is totally fine and not a prerequisite for a business or tech business
My reply was directed at the comment I replied to that maintaining state at the level and complexity described is a solved problem. Sorry I wasn't less ambiguous.
> If it was a solved problem then you would think it would be common knowledge among practicing engineers. There might even be a textbook available which contained these insights.
This sounds pretty similar to how they describe it, actually:
"Elasticsearch came to our attention…" [... another thing ...] "Pretty much on the lines of what FriendFeed did..."
So basically they reimplemented what other people had done and written about. So (especially at this level of detail) not particularly useful compared to the existing resources they talk about having seen themselves. Later they talk about a big win being "introducing caching." This is all pretty well known stuff, at least in certain circles. And yes, other companies do things in different ways - scaling a single-source-of-truth schema'd database vs going schemaless and horizontal is a source of active debate - but they do talk about these ways.
(Though, something I've also seen personally: if you staff your startup with fresh 20-something grads, you're gonna have to rediscover it... but that's another discussion?)
This sounds pretty similar to how they describe it, actually:
"Elasticsearch came to our attention…" [... another thing ...] "Pretty much on the lines of what FriendFeed did..."
So basically they reimplemented what other people had done and written about. So (especially at this level of detail) not particularly useful compared to the existing resources they talk about having seen themselves. Later they talk about a big win being "introducing caching." This is all pretty well known stuff, at least in certain circles. And yes, other companies do things in different ways - scaling a single-source-of-truth schema'd database vs going schemaless and horizontal is a source of active debate - but they do talk about these ways.
(Though, something I've also seen personally: if you staff your startup with fresh 20-something grads, you're gonna have to rediscover it... but that's another discussion?)
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Overbooking in the hotel industry is a normal practice. Cancellation rate is pretty high. Hotel Tonight deals with the last minute inventory, overbooking here would result in unsatisfied customers.
I worked for an online hotel booking site in the past. We had integrations with multiple GDS and channel managers, SynXis (Sabre) was one of them.
SynXis was not the fastest or most accurate when it came to inventory. SynXis had some ridiculous throughput limitation to query for availability, luckily we did not have to rely on that API.
I can't speak about original Sabre technology since I haven't used it myself.
Compared to five years ago, not really an impressive accomplishment thanks to advancements such as https://dotnet.github.io/orleans/
I think this can be managed by careful data modelling and smart caching easily.
Example?
The short answer is nothing. They create their own problems of scalability by their own poor engineering. Who still uses rails for an api/iphone app these days?
As far as MySQL being the bottleneck, I'm kind of wondering why that is. I'd imagine 99% of their workload is both cacheable and read only, and thus infinitely scalable.
Anyway, I've used Hotel Tonight a few times and most of my experiences with the actual product have been poor. The price I could have got through the hotel directly in a few cases would have been better, and the other time they promised a King bed only to be rebooked at the hotel to a smaller room and double bed. It seems their business model is largely around selling unused inventory at hotels for as high a price they can get, without really caring about the customer.
You'll notice they have an absolutely no money back policy. In my case I was forced to take the lesser room which was actually cheaper had I paid for it at the hotel. Since that experience I deleted their app.
As far as MySQL being the bottleneck, I'm kind of wondering why that is. I'd imagine 99% of their workload is both cacheable and read only, and thus infinitely scalable.
Anyway, I've used Hotel Tonight a few times and most of my experiences with the actual product have been poor. The price I could have got through the hotel directly in a few cases would have been better, and the other time they promised a King bed only to be rebooked at the hotel to a smaller room and double bed. It seems their business model is largely around selling unused inventory at hotels for as high a price they can get, without really caring about the customer.
You'll notice they have an absolutely no money back policy. In my case I was forced to take the lesser room which was actually cheaper had I paid for it at the hotel. Since that experience I deleted their app.
No affiliation with Hotel tonight, but depending on who they're using for providing the inventory they might not be permitted to cache the data across multiple users.
Hotels, like Airlines, love their hideously complicated rules around pricing - particularly for market segmentation.
Hotels, like Airlines, love their hideously complicated rules around pricing - particularly for market segmentation.
Where I work, the hardest scaling problem we face really boils down to lots of users contending for the same resources. It's very possible that HotelTonight sees the same issues around room availability.
Sometimes when I read articles like this, I wonder if I have stumbled into an alternate universe. I am always having to google every Nth term that pops up, and the terms are indeed surreal. I think everything is going fine until I see "Varnish".
You are definitely not alone in that feeling...
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Has anyone used HotelTonight in the last two years? Curious as I thought they were leaps ahead with their app early in the iOS native development cycle but I've heard crickets about them since
I've happily used it a few times this year - I almost always check their prices against bigger sites like hotels.com and they can usually provide a lower price if I'm booking after 6PM (before then and it's often the same price you can find directly from the hotel). More importantly, I very much value their curated set of "advice" about the hotel, and find it significantly easier to filter than sites like booking.com or otherwise.
Their mobile app is nice, and the flow is extremely smooth. I did once have to wait 45 minutes at a Best Western for their customer support to fax something across before I was able to get my room.
Their mobile app is nice, and the flow is extremely smooth. I did once have to wait 45 minutes at a Best Western for their customer support to fax something across before I was able to get my room.
I check it occasionally when doing a same-day hotel booking and I have never found a good deal. (I've only tried it for US hotels.) Very often the best price I have already found for a hotel will be matched on Hotel Tonight, but then they add their fee on top of it, making it a worse deal. And I don't like that they don't tell you about this fee till late in the purchase flow. Plus (and my info could be out of date on this point), HT doesn't tell you the bed situation in the room. Whereas on other booking sites, I know it's going to be two queens or whatever.
They used to have better rates, lately they seem to be no better than Kayak. My source for cheaper last minute hotels has been LMTClub.
Don't get me wrong hoteltonights support is great but all in all cost isn't as huge of a reason for me to use them as it was when they first came out.
Don't get me wrong hoteltonights support is great but all in all cost isn't as huge of a reason for me to use them as it was when they first came out.
I used it a year ago to book a last minute hotel, when I got to the hotel 30 mins later they said they hadn't gotten it and they had no rooms available anyway. After they called Hotel Tonight and 20 mins of waiting for faxes they found a room for us though.
Not sure if that's a positive review or not, but it worked out for me.
Not sure if that's a positive review or not, but it worked out for me.
I used it two weeks ago for the first time, got a hotel reservation two hours before arriving at 2 am for a fair price. Paid with Apple Pay and avoided thinking about currency exchange rates, etc. Very convenient iOS app.
I used it for the first time last weekend and it worked pretty well. The app is really great.
This is a frustratingly misleading title. They haven't had an IPO yet and it's unclear if they ever will.
One article in Bloomberg about trying to turn the company around and prepare for an IPO isn't the same thing. There is undoubtedly an order of magnitude (or greater) between the companies who have actually gone through an IPO and the number who have claimed they (or the press has claimed) will.
One article in Bloomberg about trying to turn the company around and prepare for an IPO isn't the same thing. There is undoubtedly an order of magnitude (or greater) between the companies who have actually gone through an IPO and the number who have claimed they (or the press has claimed) will.