Ryanair website 3 day scheduled shutdown

15 Feb 2008 by Simon Haslam (in General)  |  Comments (1)

This BBC article caught my eye yesterday: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7245378.stm. I couldn't find a source for this information on Ryanair's website on quick inspection (I think it's fair to say their colour  scheme and graphics are hardly pleasing to the eye so you don't want to spend too long browsing!).
 
I was rather surprised to see Ryanair scheduling a 3 day outage for a booking system upgrade given their almost total dependency on the website for booking flights. Whilst I don't underestimate the size of their booking system, I would have thought there would have been a strong financial case for either a quick big-bang switchover or, probably more sensibly, a parallel run phase with synchronised inventory and pricing. The extended outage suggests its going to be a big bang... let's hope the migration has been extremely well rehearsed.

Maybe this is prudent PR to preempt delays due to problems - at least people have a chance to book flights earlier if important.

I have no insider knowledge but my guess is that they're doing a wholesale switch of both their front-end and back-end booking system, quite possibly to newer technologies. Their application servers appear to run on Linux, Apache with some of the site in PHP and the booking areas in CGI (e.g. Perl). What's at the backend is open to debate but maybe due to Ryanair's relatively young age it is currently outsourced to Sabre, Galileo, Amadeus or Worldspan GDS.

It will be interesting to see what they're running in a few weeks but I'd bet on it being either J2EE or .NET (if pushed I'd say J2EE as it gives them more vendor and open source choices, but then again I would say that...). We'll see.