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Lonely Planet's three-phase journey to cloud

By Nicole Broome, ITWeb contributor
Johannesburg, 02 Nov 2016

ITWeb Cloud Summit 2017

Meet our keynote speaker from Australia, Darragh Kenney, at ITWeb's Cloud Summit 2017 as he shares his thoughts on building products, not data centres. Registration is already open. The agenda will be unveiled in just under two weeks' time. The topics for discussion are available for viewing, click here.

Iconic publisher and online company Lonely Planet (LP) credits a cloud-first strategy for its ability to focus on rapid-fire delivery of great travel products. To show how constant innovation drives the company, head of cloud services Darragh Kennedy will be a keynote speaker at the ITWeb Cloud Summit 2017.

A veteran IT professional and speaker, Kenedy's talk, entitled 'Building products, not data centres', explains how cloud lets LP pass data centre management to experts in that space, freeing up time and resources.

Kennedy explains: "Our job is capturing people's imagination through wonderful products, and my session will look at how our three-phase journey to cloud has led to a dynamic product pipeline. This feeds millions of diverse users access multiple channels to get their hands on a vast array of products such as books, magazines, apps, eBooks, video clips, Web sites and the list goes on.

"Over the past five years, LP has surfed a wave of technological developments which started with our customer facing Web sites hosted by infrastructure as a service (IAAS) saving time by enabling the projects to be completed inline with infrastructure as code. This is now a mature part of our cloud infrastructure.

"A high level of automation allows us to get new features to market with short turnaround times with what is now a tried and tested aspect of our business. A bonus is that our developers revel in their independence in managing their own infrastructure," he says.

Phase two saw software as a service (SAAS ) further smoothing the path to communication and collaboration across the globe. LP's API economy is anchored by Netsuite's developer network and includes google apps for work, with the developers using various tools to enhance LP's fast product throughput.

In the third phase, LP has recently focused on serveless architectures for the many benefits they bring. Kennedy says lower operational and infrastructure costs, lower development costs and simpler management of operations underscores an improvement in the value delivered. "Going severless has also helped us up our development velocity," he says.

Kennedy will also look at what he considers cloud's biggest disruption - the sales process and transparent licensing and pricing. He looks at who should be part of the process and asserts that bringing a creative who understands product promotion when making decisions about cloud is probably a good idea.

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