Car hire Architecture at Skyscanner

Recently, at skyscanner, we designed, built and deployed our own car hire product from scratch. In this series of blog posts, I am going to describe the architecture from initial prototype to final MVP (minimum viable product) and show how our plans and approach changed as development proceeded.

Our project design goals were:

1. Complete horizontal scaleability of all components

2. Responsive web design

3. Robustness

4. Rapid development

5. Platform separation

6. Continual Delivery

To do this we created a small cross functional team and spent an initial 4 days rapid prototyping and then demoed the (working) prototype at our company update. Off the back of that we received our licence to operate and started developing in earnest. We launched our MVP at the start of 2013 and have been continually deploying updates ever since. We smashed our revenue target for the year inside 3 months.

You can see the a video of the final prototype below:

Next up Phase1 - The Idea