CIOIN

Charan Padmaraju

Co-founder and CTO, redBus

By moving to the cloud we freed up our resources to develop apps that gave us a competitive edge.

Executive summary

Moving to the cloud enabled redBus to use IT to create business differentiation and a competitive advantage.

The Organization: About five years back, a few friends working with top IT firms decided to quit their jobs. They wanted to help people book bus tickets online. After planes and trains, booking bus tickets online sounded obvious. But nobody in India had thought about it. Except for the founders of redBus. Today, the company sells bus tickets through its online portal or through the Web services of its agents. To date, redBus claims to have sold over 2 million bus tickets.

The Business case: After using a traditional datacenter for over a year, redBus ran into scalability issues.  Procuring a new server or upgrading an existing one took more than two weeks.
Moreover, the limited server capacity could not effectively handle processing fluctuations, which had a negative impact on productivity. “We wanted to open a port on one of our servers and it took two days! On another occasion, the memory size wasn't enough to service the workload,” says Charan Padmaraju, co-founder and CTO, redBus.
The Project: Padmaraju realized that procuring new hardware was no more an option. He knew the answer lay in a cloud solution. And that was something that wasn’t new to redBus.
redBus is much larger than its closest competitor in terms of its resource network. To capitalize on that, the company offers software, on a SaaS basis, to its bus operators. This gives them the option of handling their own ticketing and managing their own inventories.  The service helps bus operators get access to a large number of customers.redBus used a cloud vendor, Amazon Web Service (AWS), to build its SaaS offering. 
First Steps: Padmaraju observed that the entire process of hosting and managing this service was smooth and easy. So he decided to move his entire infrastructure to the cloud.
Today, all redBus’ applications, including the mission critical ones are on the AWS cloud. This solution includes features such as the ability to easily manage access to servers through security groups, easy-to-use self-service management console, the concept of Elastic IPs, and superior support.
The cloud solution has empowered Padmaraju’s developers to focus on building apps based on their business needs and customize for the customer. This was not possible in the older model where developers were spending time making changes to the apps to accommodate the traditional datacenter’s limited capabilities.

The Benefits: After moving to the cloud and hosting their infrastructure at the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) region, the traffic to redBus has increased 3 folds due to reduced latency. “This would’ve been possible only in a cloud platform due to its elasticity and scalability. It has also given us an overall cost benefit of about 30 to 40 percent,” claims Padmaraju. 
redBus’ business no longer needs to wait because of capability limitations associated with a traditional datacenter. As soon as there is a demand, Padmaraju has the infrastructure ready to meet it.  “The use of cloud technology has given us the competitive edge that helps us to innovate quickly,” says Padmaraju.