Traveloka Advances Innovation, Productivity, and System Resilience with AWS Training and Certification

Since its inception, Traveloka has been building its technology framework and operation with AWS. Traveloka evolved to become Southeast Asia’s leading travel platform, providing services for more than 45 million monthly active users across Southeast Asia. The need for more structured training became evident as the company scaled and the engineering employee base increased to the hundreds. Tourism is one of the most dynamic and fast-paced industries, and the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated it even further. Hence, Traveloka had to adapt its workforce training to respond quickly to evolving customer demands. The previous method of peer-to-peer training was becoming obsolete with hybrid work, and that challenge led Traveloka to turn to AWS Training and Certification.

Traveloka used AWS Learning Needs Analysis, a self-assessment tool that organizations can apply to evaluate the existing skill set of their employees and build a data-driven plan to accelerate learning. “The level of AWS knowledge varied across different teams and individuals,” says Jose Dalino, head of engineering at Traveloka. “We saw an opportunity to work with AWS Training and Certification to get everyone to the same desired level.”

In 2021, the company piloted courses in cloud architecture and security from AWS Classroom Training, which provides in-demand cloud skills and best practices taught by expert AWS instructors. After trying the courses, the company enrolled in more classes to support its business and tech road map. Traveloka trained more than 50 percent of its engineers in foundational and advanced courses in 2022. These included courses like Architecting on AWS for learning how to design good cloud architecture and AWS Security Essentials for learning fundamental AWS Cloud security concepts.

Along with AWS Classroom Training, Traveloka turned to AWS Skill Builder, an online learning center with more than 600 digital courses and learning plans. The company enrolled in the AWS Skill Builder Team subscription, which is used for cloud skill development with administrative features, reporting, and access to hands-on learning in AWS Builder Labs, where learners develop cloud skills with hands-on practice and other tools. “Complementing virtual classroom training with on-demand microlearning modules offered by AWS Skill Builder really contributes to better skills retention,” says Dalino. “It translates to our engineers improving the application of their learning in day-to-day work.”

With this newfound resource, Traveloka’s engineers seized the opportunity to learn new skills and were able to implement new technologies in their projects at a much quicker pace. Overall, Traveloka saw an average of 10–15 percent reductions in engineering timelines, from bugs being fixed to new features being expedited across the production timeline. “We have seen a reduction in lead time for changes,” says Dalino. “Our metrics have decreased from when an idea or user story is added to an engineering team’s queue to when it reaches production.”

The security courses offered through AWS Skill Builder were particularly impactful for Traveloka; the company has strengthened its security posture and reduced the occurrence of security-related events. “Our engineers have a better understanding of how to secure our workloads on the cloud,” says Dalino. Traveloka’s engineering team learned about specific AWS security services, like AWS WAF, which is a firewall solution that organizations can use to protect against common web bugs. With this knowledge, the team improved its automated detection response mitigation from distributed denial-of-service issues, resulting in improved reliability of the solution for end users.

Due to the improved training, Traveloka has increased efficiency through compute savings plans, which are flexible instance models with personalized cost, as well as fee reservations. The company also doubled the use of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances, which organizations can use to run fault-tolerant workloads that save costs by up to 90 percent.

Traveloka’s engineers have been using AWS Skill Builder’s exam preparation courses for AWS Certifications and AWS Cloud Quest, a fun, interactive role-playing game to develop in-demand cloud skills. The effectiveness of this blended approach has been evident in the application of learning in projects and in the way Traveloka’s architecture continues to evolve. “We were able to shift from virtual machines to running on containers and without servers,” says Dalino. “This would not have been possible without our training initiative for the engineers.”

Traveloka will continue to use the learning gained from training to roll out new projects around improved security, availability, and reliability to benefit its customers. In addition, more people in roles across the organization, from engineering to finance to product management, will be taking AWS Training and Certification programs.

“It’s been a great experience working with AWS Training and Certification to build the cloud skills and confidence of our engineers,” says Dalino. “We’ve been able to accelerate the way we innovate and improve our security posture.”