Qantas has launched social-flavoured vacation booking website Hooroo using the cloud and open-source software.
Hooroo suggests food, hotels and activities in destinations around Australia, and lets users create profiles showing where they’ve been and want to go. Visitors can book travel and accommodation through the website. Users can opt into an e-mail newsletter with deals and suggestions, and earn Hooroo credit that can be used for booking discounts.
The website was built with the Cloud instead of physical servers and uses open-source software, said Hooroo head of technology, John Sullivan.
“Cloud lets us quickly and efficiently create new production environments that scale as user demand increases,” Sullivan said in a statement. “It also allows us to move and backup data across multiple zones, creating a theoretically fail-safe system.”
Using the cloud also let Qantas build Hooroo in weeks and for less money than it would otherwise cost, the company said.
The site incorporates Ruby on Rails for applications, Linux for the operating system and Solr for its search engine. “The decision to use open source software enables Hooroo to benefit from the regular, iterative improvements made to that software by a global community of developers,” Sullivan said.