From flights to rental cars to hotel rooms, planning a trip involves tracking down a lot of independently moving pieces, and Travelport has been simplifying this process for more than 50 years, powering bookings for travel agencies and airlines like American Airlines, EasyJet, and Southwest Airlines with its worldwide travel retail platform. Nowadays, Travelport aims to reinvent a simpler future for travel’s complex ecosystem.

But travel wasn’t the only complex ecosystem in need of reinvention. After decades of building, deploying, and operating a mix of standard and bespoke applications for its customers, Travelport found that its own ecosystem had started to become unmanageable. Without proper standards in place, the company’s collection of applications and their associated CI/CD tooling—from build tools to version control systems and beyond—had grown to more than 1,600 pieces of software. Travelport needed to modernize and streamline its tech stack so its developers could focus more on innovating, rather than managing applications. It chose to consolidate on GitHub Enterprise. 

“When we decided to modernize, we started essentially at ground zero and asked ourselves what DevOps really meant at Travelport. We outlined all the services we needed in a DevOps platform, examined the options, and it was a pretty simple decision,” said Michael Oubre, director of engineering excellence at Travelport. “GitHub, in terms of cost and performance, is head and shoulders above everything else.”

Travelport’s recent challenge, however, was migrating this complex stack to a more-secure Enterprise Cloud instance that supports Enterprise Managed User. At first, the company tried to migrate just using the GitHub API, but it was challenging to deal with the more than 6,000 repos across different locations and associated with more than 1,500 developers across 300 teams. The support staff at GitHub noticed the team’s difficulties and pointed them to GitHub Enterprise Importer (GEI), a data migration tool that turned what would have been a 10-week disruption manually moving from server to cloud into an automated process that spanned just a few days. In the final month of the company’s migration, it moved more than 4,000 repositories and 200 teams over from its original Enterprise Cloud instance to the new EMU instance. 

GitHub Enterprise Importer has been a godsend. It has given us a smooth path to migrating all our repositories.

“GitHub Enterprise Importer has been a godsend. It has given us a smooth path to migrating all our repositories.“ said Oubre. “Without GEI, we wouldn't have been able to get our engineering teams to migrate, period. They would have put it off indefinitely so it wouldn’t disrupt their workflows. With GEI, we could move a large group of repositories very quickly so the teams only needed to plan for a few hours of downtime at most.”

Tool sprawl had also led to inconsistency in roles and permissions within the company, and so Travelport adopted GitHub Enterprise Managed Users (EMUs) to more easily manage access control for its developers. Previously, developers may have stepped on each other's toes by making unwanted changes, but EMUs have helped the company create and enforce company-wide policies for its developers. The consolidation of code and tooling into a single platform, alongside policy consistency, has provided vast efficiency increases in management.

“I've been pretty much the sole administrator for our GitHub instances up until now,” explained Oubre. “Our leadership team assembled a decision forum where we made GitHub policy and configuration decisions. That gave us a way to educate people who could go back to their teams and begin to voluntarily remodel how they were doing certain things.”

The company has also begun rolling out GitHub Copilot, the AI pair programmer, to 160 of its developers to help save time on repetitive tasks and boilerplate code. Already, it’s a success. “They're addicted,” said Oubre. “They're never going to give it up.” 

With GitHub Copilot, the uptick in your delivery capability is amazing. It has helped me get up to speed with APIs that I've never seen before and quickly build best practice code. It's just a great experience and a joy to use.

Oubre said he’s also been using GitHub Copilot recently, and he can’t help but agree. “The uptick in your delivery capability is amazing,” said Oubre. “It has helped me get up to speed with APIs that I've never seen before and quickly build best practice code. It's just a great experience and a joy to use.”

Travelport’s newfound consistency has also allowed the company to adopt an innersource model, organizing its repositories and developers into a model of maintainers and contributors within its developer organization. “We had a lot of systems out there, and often developers didn't know where that code lived. You didn't have any access to a project’s code unless you were on the team that wrote it,” said Oubre. “When we started migrating to GitHub, we adopted an innersource model right out of the gate and saw a big change.”

GitHub Actions has also played a large role in consolidating tool sprawl and enabling Travelport’s developers to work faster and more efficiently. During the migration process, Oubre built an automated workflow using GitHub Actions and the GitHub Enterprise Importer to allow teams to migrate in a cadence that aligned with their schedules and priorities. With the migration now in the past, Travelport has also rebuilt old CI/CD pipelines. Previously, each pipeline required several people to manage it. Now, with GitHub Actions, a single employee can build and operate complex processes. For example, a single employee manages the pipeline used by more than 80 teams collaborating across over 1,000 repositories on a new microservices development initiative.

It used to take three months to make major changes to our pipelines with our previous CI/CD vendor. With GitHub Actions, you can make major changes in a pipeline extremely quickly. It only takes about as long as it takes to think about it.

“It used to take three months to make major changes to our pipelines with our previous CI/CD vendor,” said Oubre. “With GitHub Actions, you can make major changes in a pipeline extremely quickly. It only takes about as long as it takes to think about it.”

Since adopting GitHub, Travelport has been able to trade technological complexity for unified processes on a single platform that helps promote best practices company-wide. Rather than relying on custom implementations for its applications, the company now employs reusable and uniform approaches with tools like GitHub Action, while GitHub Copilot empowers developers to innovate, rather than wrangle antiquated tech stacks. 

“GitHub is a natural lever for empowering our developers. There are fewer learning curves for our engineers, but it provides the team the ability to adhere to our best practices in a way we haven't in the past,” said Oubre. “We’re excited to continue working with GitHub and its evolutionary approach to building new features. You see a good idea and the next thing you know, it’s available on GitHub.”