AWS Case Study: Virgin Atlantic Airways
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Virgin Atlantic Airways, the company announced their new travel website, Vtravelled.com. This travel portal aims to connect travel lovers around the world and give them a social network to easily share travel tips, pictures and more.
As Virgin’s airplanes take off into the clouds, so does their new website: Vtravelled.com runs entirely on the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform. Vexed Digital, in collaboration with Virgin, decided to launch the new website on AWS for its flexibility and on-demand scalability.
Currently, Amazon EC2 is used to run the site’s load balancing, web, search, and databases servers. Elastic Block Store provides storage capacity for database and search indexes, while Amazon S3 is used to store media uploaded by users and Virgin Atlantic Airways. Also, since the site attracts visitors worldwide, they use Amazon CloudFront’s global edge network to distribute site content, such as the map tiles, CSS, and images.
With Virgin Atlantic anticipating a great deal of publicity around the website launch, AWS allowed Vtravelled the flexibility to scale very quickly if required. “We did look at a number of more traditional hosting solutions, but very quickly came to the conclusion that AWS would meet our needs much better and at a lower cost,” recalls Dave Tharp, head of development on the Vtravelled project. “The on-demand nature of EC2 was very attractive as it allowed us to be comfortable in the knowledge that we could scale the hardware very, very quickly.”
Virgin Atlantic appreciated the ability to only pay for the computing resources used, hour by hour, and found that Amazon S3 provided a very low upfront cost to store user data. In past projects they had purchased dedicated storage servers and always ended up having much more capacity than necessary.
“We’ve undoubtedly saved a lot of time and money that we would normally have had to spend on setting up, installing servers and maintaining servers,” says Tharp. “In addition to this, we’ve not had to deal with the headache of organizing the hardware – we can just log in and start up instances as and when we require them.”
AWS also made ongoing development, testing and deployment much easier. “We were able to try out major configuration changes separate to the main site and then switch over, with the ability to switch back, if necessary; normally this requires the purchase of a lot of additional physical hardware, which was not the case with Amazon Web Services.”
Virgin Atlantic and Vexed Digital were pleased with the end result: an interactive travel website that runs on the reliable, scalable infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services.
Check out the website at http://vtravelled.com 
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