By Agam Shah
The U.S. government has made it easier to book a camping trip by
moving a travel portal to the cloud, a tech revamp that makes the
website more reliable and gives it the flexibility to add
services.
Since its move to the cloud a year ago, Recreation.gov has drawn
more visitors to less-famous attractions and has saved paperwork --
and money -- for individual parks that can now be booked
online.
The website can be used for booking public campsites, getting
park permits and reserving activities or tour tickets. It has
access to more than 3,500 locations, including national parks,
recreation areas and historic sites such as the Washington
Monument.
To help meet growing online demand, the Recreation.gov revamp
tapped container technology, which companies use to stay agile in
an increasingly software-defined world. Complex applications are
broken into small pieces of code defining a certain service, placed
into software shells, and distributed across devices. Using
containers to cordon off services like booking can cut development
costs, allow for personalization and help the reservation system
run faster.
The portal, which runs on Amazon.com Inc.'s Amazon Web Services
cloud service, offers more than 45 services, including camping
inventory, tour tickets, entry passes and hunting permits. Over the
past year, the site has generated about $150 million in revenue for
the government.
Among other improvements, the new system lets campers use a
mobile app to reserve campsites, something that wasn't possible
earlier. People who book using the portal can be alerted in real
time about reservation cancellations due to forest fires, floods or
government shutdowns.
The government hired contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. to
handle the Recreation.gov revamp. The 10-year, $182 million
contract began in 2017.
The effort represents a small component of the government's
quest to modernize its information technology, in part by
incorporating tools and practices found in the commercial
sector.
Federal agencies are moving aging technology into the cloud from
on-premises data centers to automate processes and cut costs, said
Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished vice president and analyst at
research and advisory firm Gartner Inc.
"I think of [the Recreation.gov revamp] as a steppingstone for
them to really modernize their environment, to make it more cloud
friendly, and at the same time, get some cost savings out of the
underlying infrastructure," Mr. Chandrasekaran said.
Booking campsites can be extremely competitive, especially at
locations such as Yosemite National Park in central California,
where the most popular spots are made available up to five months
earlier. They can sell out in a matter of minutes.
"The public nowadays more than ever wants to know they have a
spot when they get there. When I was young, we would just drive up
and find a campsite, no big deal," said 56-year-old Rick DeLappe,
program manager for Recreation.gov at the National Park
Service.
How the system helps users:
-- The service to book campsites is prioritized to handle extra
traffic during, say, the late winter and early spring, when
summertime reservations for Yosemite campsites become
available.
-- A technology that manages the containers makes sure the
booking system meets demand so campers don't hit busy servers.
-- The containers used for the booking system are replicated in
servers across different regions of the country, meaning every
would-be camper gets an equal shot at a coveted camping spot.
"When everybody shows up to click the buy button at the same
time, there is not a huge snowball effect on the service," said
Martin Folkoff, chief technologist in Booz Allen Hamilton's
strategic innovation group.
Site development started in mid-2017 and the portal was deployed
to Amazon Web Services in October 2018. This is the first time the
portal was built for the cloud, which provides the foundation to
cater to new interfaces like mobile, Mr. DeLappe said.
Thanks to the technology refresh, Recreation.gov has been able
to release a constant stream of updates.
More than 100 sites have been added since February, among them
Indiana Dunes National Park along the shores of Lake Michigan.
Campsite reservations have increased about 30% from last year's
figures, said Will Healy, vice president at Booz Allen
Hamilton.
For Olympic National Park near Seattle, the revamp cut costs.
The park, which was added to Recreation.gov this year, projects it
will save about 5,000 staff hours and up to $150,000 a year.
Write to Agam Shah at agam.shah@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 10, 2019 17:34 ET (21:34 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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