“This decision coincided with the end of our lease with the Port Melbourne data center and the leased equipment in the headquarters data center reaching end-of-life,” says Kennedy. The London office’s decision to move from the shared infrastructure in Melbourne to Amazon Web Services (AWS) prompted the organization to review how it ran its applications. “We wanted to significantly increase the number of builds they could run on a daily basis, while cutting the time for each build to finish.”Ī team based in London operated Lonely Planet’s website,. “Our developers were completing as few as four software builds per day, and each build took about an hour and a half to finish,” says Darragh Kennedy, Online Platform Manager, Lonely Planet. However, the current infrastructure couldn’t support these strategies efficiently. Lonely Planet had shifted to agile development and DevOps strategies to allow greater experimentation with products and services, break down organization silos, and enable a faster time to market. Lonely Planet relied on 600 virtualized servers running on leased equipment in its main office to build, develop, test, stage, and launch new applications, and operated production websites out of a leased facility in Port Melbourne.

The company’s Melbourne development team developed a shared publishing platform to streamline the process of creating text, images, audio and video, and then uploading content to digital formats. To address changes in the market, Lonely Planet decided to create and repurpose content across a range of formats, extending print to the web and mobile applications. The Internet, combined with the explosion in smartphones and tablets, fundamentally changed how travelers read and share information with each other.

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