Case study

Leading travel agency marks the 6th year of running mission-critical Oracle databases on AWS with FlashGrid

Challenge

Apollo’s services rely on the continuous operation of its booking systems with millions of users all year round. This requires high availability from their Oracle database backend, which FlashGrid Cluster has successfully powered since 2017.

Solution

Apollo’s technical team chose FlashGrid Cluster for Oracle RAC on AWS because of its ease of deployment, maintenance, and scaling on EC2, as well as FlashGrid’s 24×7 technical support for the entire database infrastructure from proof-of-concept to deployment and maintenance. As a result, Apollo seamlessly transitioned its core business application to AWS while staying true to the proven Oracle Applications and Oracle Database stack.

This long-standing partnership has helped Apollo serve millions of customers without disruptions, most recently during the performance upgrade of their mission-critical Oracle databases. Apollo’s team initially deployed DB 12.2, RHEL 7, and R4 EC2 instances; in 2024, they upgraded to DB 19c, RHEL 8, and R6i instances. As always, FlashGrid’s technical support was on-hand to ensure a smooth transition.

FlashGrid Cluster technical details

  • Two Oracle RAC database nodes in different availability zones (multi-AZ)
  • EC2 instance size: r6i.16xlarge
  • Storage: 7 TB on EBS general-purpose SSD volumes
  • Oracle Database ver. 19c
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

This configuration allows Apollo to reach the performance it needs at the lowest cost by using EBS general-purpose SSD volumes for storage and its multi-AZ deployment protects against data center outages.

Using FlashGrid Launcher, Apollo’s team created IaC (infrastructure as code) CloudFormation templates and deployed HA database clusters in a fully automated and repeatable way.

“Since 2017, FlashGrid’s software and 24×7 support have helped us meet the high availability needs of our main travel booking application in AWS. We greatly value their ongoing partnership and expertise.”

Karsten Porsager Haastrup, Head of IT Operations at Apollo, DER Touristik Nordic

This case study serves as a testament to the robustness of cloud infrastructure and the ease with which it is possible to perform upgrade cycles compared to on-premises data centers.

FlashGrid is proud to power Apollo’s booking system’s backend, ensuring reliable customer experience for holiday bookers for many years to come.

Apollo

Apollo is part of DER Touristik Nordic and one of the Nordic region’s leading tour operators. They provide holiday packages for customers who travel worldwide, from sunny beaches to exciting cities, and a secure online flight and hotel booking system for those who like to organize their own trips.

www.apollo.se

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