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At trivago we operate a hybrid infrastructure of both on-premise machines and clusters on Google Cloud. Over time, we came up with a set of deployment guidelines for running our workloads as more and more of them are migrating to Google Cloud. These are not strict rules, but rather suggestions to best serve each team's needs.

After 15 years as a game/application developer and trainer, Benjamin decided to make test automation his career. He's currently a Test Automation Engineer in trivago's core QA team. Benjamin is also the author and maintainer of two open source projects for Cucumber BDD parallel test execution and reporting. He is an occasional speaker at conferences on testing and automation.

The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity.
— C.A.R. Hoare, Turing Award lecture

Have you ever enthusiastically released a new, delightful version to production and then suddenly started hearing a concerning number of notification sounds? Gets your heart beating right? After all, you didn't really expect this to happen because it worked in the development environment.

On a normal day, we ingest a lot of data into our ELK clusters (~6TB across all of our data centers). This is mostly operational data (logs) from different components in our infrastructure. This data ranges from purely technical info (logs from our services) to data about which pages our users are loading (intersection between business and technical data).

Throughout my career, I’ve had times where I worked 100% remotely. Overall working remotely can have benefits and even make you more productive as an engineer. I would like to share 5 tips that have worked very well for me.

Last year, when visiting CloudNativeCon/KubeCon Europe in Barcelona (one of the biggest cloud-focused conferences in Europe), I noticed that there were some companies present in the exhibition space whose primary focus wasn't software development. I was surprised to see companies from finance to sportswear as Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sponsors. There I discovered various CNCF membership types and learned about the End User Supporter membership.

Imagine you go to your hotel for check-in and they say that your dog is not allowed even though the website clearly states that it is!

trivago gets information about millions of accommodations from hundreds of partners and they keep on updating. There are many differences not just in the data format, but also in the data itself. There can be many discrepancies in the information and consolidating them can be a very complex process. But it's our responsibility to provide the most accurate information to the best of our knowledge.

We recently hosted a Q&A on our trivago tech Twitter and Life at trivago Instagram page, where we gave our followers the opportunity to ask our developers anything. Even though we tried to answer all of them on the day, we decided to compile some of the most recurring questions and their answers for you below!

trivago open sourced a Prettier plugin for the Twig template language. It is available under the Apache 2.0 license, and you can access it on trivago's Github space.

The trivago core product runs on our own frontend framework Melody. Melody uses a Twig-inspired template language because when it was introduced, it had to be interoperable with our existing codebase, which was based on the Symfony PHP framework with Twig as the default template language.

To the outside, trivago appears to be one single software product providing our popular hotel meta search. Behind the scenes, however, it is home to dozens of projects and tools to support it. Teams are encouraged to choose the programming languages and frameworks that will get the job done best. Only few restrictions are placed on the teams in these decisions, primarily long-term maintainability. As a result, trivago has a largely polyglot code base that fosters creativity and diverse thinking. It allows us to make informed decisions based on actual requirements rather than legacy code or antiquated projects.

At the end of last year, to celebrate our continued sponsorship of the Open Source community, we hosted a small conference with special guests at our Düsseldorf campus. We initially hoped to welcome Tobias Koppers and Sean Larkin from Webpack, plus some internal speakers. What we didn't expect was the huge amount of fantastic speakers who wanted to present their projects to the community. In the end, Sean unfortunately couldn't make it but we did have a chance to welcome Marvin Hagemeister, Juan Picado, Norbert de Langen and Pia Mancini as speakers, plus our own amazing talents.

At trivago, we generate a huge amount of logs and we have our own custom setup for shipping logs using mostly Protocol Buffers. Eventually we end up with some fields in Elasticsearch (ES) that contain partial (or full) URLs. For instance, in our specific case we store the query component of the URL in a field called query and the path component in a field named url_path. Sample values for these fields could be:

At trivago we live diversity. We have 55 localised platforms and internally you can find talents from around 90 different nationalities all working towards providing a better experience to our customers. We are constantly evolving as we face organisational, societal and industrial challenges. That's why we identify a lot with this year's theme "A New Dawn", as we too explore the meaning and evolution of our approaches and practices. This year we have decided to support IxDA20 through sponsorship for the first time. It reflects our belief and increasing efforts to invest in Design and Research at trivago as we strive for an inclusive world.

In the beginning of 2019, the trivago Magazine team decided to switch over from a JavaScript Single Page Application to Server-Side Rendering. This article describes the why, the how, and further challenges of this journey.

We strongly believe in sharing knowledge not only internally, but also with the tech community around the world. This is one of the reasons why we support Open Source software through development and sponsorship. For example, we are the second biggest supporter on Open Collective and we have a ton of our own Open Source projects too. (Check out our Open Source page for more info.)