Kiwi.com: From crisis to efficiency through modern cloud solutions

In times of crisis, a company’s ability to reinvent itself can make all the difference between survival and failure. The story of Kiwi.com, one of the world’s largest airline ticketing platforms, shows how an inspired technology decision can turn a difficult situation into an opportunity for efficiency. At the height of the pandemic, when the travel industry was facing its worst crisis in history, this company was able to significantly reduce its operational costs and improve its services with one strategic move: migrating to a modern cloud infrastructure based on AMD EPYC processors. Here’s how a smart technology choice can change the trajectory of a business in critical times:

What is Kiwi.com?

Kiwi.com is an online travel agency founded in 2012, based in the Czech Republic, that helps people from all over the world find the cheapest airfares. More than 50 million searches are conducted daily through Kiwi.com’s website and mobile apps to find the best deals on flights to destinations on all continents. One of the most popular features is NOMAD, which allows users with flexible itineraries to optimize the order of their flights and countries visited to minimize travel costs. The platform is accessible on both PC and phone via the Kiwi.com app, which stands out for its speed and ease of use. To give you an idea at the time of writing, Kiwi.com offers low-cost flights to destinations in Italy, Malta, Greece, and Cyprus, for users based in my country (Romania).

With Kiwi.com, you can find great deals on flights

A big challenge for Kiwi.com: The COVID-19 pandemic and high infrastructure costs

The year 2020 has been an extremely difficult time for the whole of humanity, with the aviation industry being one of the hardest hit sectors. According to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), passenger numbers fell dramatically in 2020 to just 1.8 billion, compared to around 4.5 billion in 2019, registering a 60% decline. This resulted in huge financial losses: airlines lost around $370 billion, airports $115 billion and air navigation service providers $13 billion.

In this challenging environment, Kiwi.com faced a significant drop in customers and ticket sales. High operational costs were no longer sustainable in the new conditions, requiring a radical transformation of the technical infrastructure. As a global service provider, the company was using a combination of cloud and non-cloud infrastructure, with servers from various manufacturers, all based on Intel processors. The complexity of their systems and high latency resulted in significant costs that had to be reduced. The company needed a more efficient, cloud-based infrastructure at a lower cost and with lower power consumption to better withstand operations during such a volatile time.

The solution adopted by Kiwi.com

After analyzing the available options, Kiwi.com’s engineers opted to migrate to Google Cloud services using AMD EPYC processors. Preliminary tests showed that the new infrastructure could handle larger computing workloads while simultaneously reducing operational costs. The migration process started with non-cloud servers, resulting in a more efficient infrastructure that offered the same services with fewer servers. The next step was to migrate the existing cloud infrastructure to Google Cloud, achieving an even better price/performance ratio.

An important aspect of the decision was also the environmental impact. The AMD EPYC processors in the Google Cloud servers reduced both electricity consumption and emissions. Efficiency was significantly increased by replacing groups of 5 old servers with a single server based on AMD EPYC processors. Benefits included improved latency, increased performance, and monthly savings of approximately $10,000 in operational costs.

All these improvements allowed Kiwi.com to successfully navigate the turbulent years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

AMD EPYC 5th Gen Processors: Innovating for the future

The latest (5th) Generation AMD EPYC, launching October 2024, is based on the Zen 5 and Zen 5c architectures. These processors offer a hybrid design optimized for modern data centers, making them ideal for cloud services, virtualized environments, and artificial intelligence applications. The technical specifications stand out thanks to their versatility: ranging from 8 to 192 cores and from 16 to 384 threads, with base frequencies between 2.10 GHz and 4.20 GHz and boost frequencies between 3.7 and 5 GHz, depending on the chosen processor.

5th Gen AMD Epyc CPU

This generation’s performance translates to up to 17% increase in IPC (Instructions Per Cycle) for enterprise and cloud tasks, and up to 37% increase in IPC for AI and HPC (High Performance Computing) tasks. High power efficiency relative to core count makes this generation a great choice for cloud computing services, enterprise, AI & Machine Learning data centers, as well as HPC (High Performance Computing). All of this can get very technical, so I recommend this video showing you the latest when it comes to AMD EPYC 5th Gen processors:

I hope you found this information interesting, and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask using the comments form below.