Travel Platform Reduces CDN Costs by 50% with Amazon CloudFront Multi-Region Deployment
Skyscanner, a global travel marketplace serving 100 million monthly users, consolidated its CDN infrastructure to Amazon CloudFront, achieving 50% cost savings and 99.99% cache-hit rates across 110 market domains.
Value Results Summary
Skyscanner, a global leader in travel connecting 100 million monthly users with over 1,200 travel partners across 110 market domains, operated with a fragmented technology stack that hindered operational efficiency and cost optimization. The company faced the complex challenge of migrating from a legacy CDN provider that had accumulated nearly a decade of custom configurations while handling 1.5 billion daily API requests representing approximately 24 terabytes of data. To achieve its goal of standardizing infrastructure and reducing operational costs, Skyscanner needed a migration strategy that guaranteed zero global downtime and maintained fault tolerance across its customer-facing applications.
Skyscanner engaged AWS to develop and implement Amazon CloudFront as its new content delivery network, complemented by a custom serverless image handler that automatically compresses static content to optimize delivery costs. The team utilized AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) to define infrastructure as code using familiar programming languages, reducing configuration complexity from 26,000 lines of code to 1,000 lines. To enhance security and reliability, Skyscanner deployed AWS Shield Advanced for distributed denial-of-service protection and configured multi-region failover capabilities, ensuring that traffic could automatically route to alternate AWS regions during incidents. The migration occurred in phases over three months, beginning with less-trafficked market domains to build team confidence before transitioning production traffic.
Since migrating to Amazon CloudFront, Skyscanner scaled to handle 3 billion monthly API requests while maintaining a 99.99% average cache-hit rate for images, delivering significantly improved performance to its global user base. The serverless image handler architecture reduced CDN operational costs by 50% while simplifying infrastructure management through AWS-managed services. The company now operates with fewer moving parts and reduced deployment risk, positioning itself to adopt blue-green deployment strategies for accelerated innovation and rapid rollback capabilities in its future roadmap.
