RUG::B

Due to its very dynamic nature, the hotel business presents a number of engineering challenges. Prices and availability change constantly, hotels sell their inventory via multiple channels, etc.

At HotelTonight, we’re handling constant inventory and price updates from multiple sources for thousands of our hotels. We also need a robust notification engine for broadcasting change events to various parts of our distributed system.

In this talk, I’d like to describe how we’re able to scale our distributed hotel inventory and rates storage using an append-only store built on top of MySQL and the Sequel gem, keeping both writes and reads fast. I’ll also be comparing trade-offs of various alternative approaches.