Synopsis
The clients, an international airline conglomerate wished to build a single solution for customer self-services kiosks used in departure and connections area for multiple airlines. The clients wished to have global deployment of the new application. In order to enable such large-scale deployment, the clients wanted to collaborate with someone with expertise of working on large projects and huge clients and for the same, they entrusted Coforge Limited with the responsibility.
About the Client
Launched in 2011, the clients are one of the world’s largest aviation group and combines leading airlines in countries like Ireland, Spain and the UK. The group comprises some of the huge names in the aviation industry as its brand. They carry around 110 million passengers a year with around 600 aircrafts covering 250+ destinations. The group has been creating value to their customers by providing distinctive offerings in different geographies.
Problem Statement
As IAG sought to innovate and grow faster, they found them-self-limited by its existing technology environment. IAG was running its monolithic application workload in its datacentre, but the technology that datacentre used was holding them back. It didn’t offer them the innovative features they needed.
With such a large scale, it typically took the developers 10-15 days to stand up development environments for testing new features. It was too costly and not fast enough. Even small-scale experiments took time in number of days. IAG also wanted to streamline development processes to support its new continuous integration and delivery focus.
The company also needed to ensure high availability. “Kiosk based Self Check-in facility for the passengers is a mission-critical application, and the number of customers potentially impacted by downtime is huge,” says principal solutions engineer for IAG. To overcome these challenges, IAG decided to move to DevOps process and looked at many options but AWS was the clear leader in cloud and devopsadoptions.
Proposed Solution & Architecture
Proposed Solution was to re-architect the existing solution to micro-services based solution that could be deployed on AWS ECS based infrastructure. Coforge followed a structured approach and the latest framework to build the new application. We used our expertise of AWS, microservices, agile and DevOps to factor the application into microservices. Coforge decided to containerize the applications, build an agile DevOps pipeline to track application modernization and brought in a blue green strategy to manage and automate container deployment.
The application was developed using the best industrial authentication mechanism and security was on the top priority. IAG Kiosk’s touchpoint app was designed using micro services architecture and angular enabled UI. The application designed for cloud provides scalability and a flexible architecture adopting technologies like Kubernetes and Angular.
The runtime platform was node.js and java platform was spring boot. For event services, we used SQS, for service gateways, we leveraged zuul. We utilised Eureka for service discovery and keycloak for authentication. Mashery was used for API gateway and to utilise the persistent storage, Amazon redis DB was used. The cloud native architecture leverages AWS services of EKS and CloudWatch to provide scalability, application monitoring and insight.
The overall above architecture kiosk brings operational efficiencies. Coforge has also used AWS CI/CD to automate the application’s release and reduced the overall time in releasing the new application. Coforge applied AWS Code Commit as code repository and AWS Code Pipeline, Code Build and Code Deploy along with Amazon ECR to automate build generation and code deployment. Below is the architecture of the solution
AWS Services that were used as part of the solution
Amazon Cloud Watch, Amazon EC2, AWS ElastiCache, EBS, ECR, ECS, RDS, Route 53, S3, SQS, VPC, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Code Build, AWS Code Deploy, AWS Code Commit, AWS Code Pipeline, AWS IAM, AWS KMS, AWS management Console, AWS CLI, ELB.
Benefits
Leveraging Coforge Limited’ AWS cloud experience, in depth domain knowledge and expertise of working with large clients from travel, transportation and hospitality sector; we were able to perform the global deployment of the new kiosk application only by uploading its configuration in order to consume check in microservices. There was a reduction in airport operation cost by adopting microservices pattern and AWS cloud platform. Auto-scalability, high-performance, reliability, easy maintenance and security are some of the features of this new application. Using the Coforge’ cloud services, the client was able to reduce the technological and debt as well as the solution cost. Some of the values that were delivered to the clients were as follows:
Cycle time :
2-3 days (Up to 80%) reduction in cycle time as the Environment provisioning time is reduced by 85% due to automation
Productivity :
Up to 95% improvement in productivity due to saving of effort of in environment provisioning and manual coordination to obtain approvals etc. Appreciation from frequent flyers and business flyers who travel with little luggage
The Coforge Limited Advantage:
Coforge, with in-depth knowledge of the client’s infrastructure from previous engagements, deployed teams that had strong expertise in cloud and an ability to use automation. Our knowledge of the client’s business meant we could plan a workaround in business-critical periods in advance, ensuring minimal impact on business functions.
Coforge, recognized as a “Leader” by Nelson hall for cloud migration provides a vast range of cloud services. The services include
Cloud readiness assessment and advisory Cloud migration and data center transformation Cloud management and Operations
Our partnership with AWS, deep expertise in industry and domain knowledge of the travel, transportation and hospitality industry places us as a unique contender to take on such challenges and deliver value to the customer with finesse keeping our motto of ‘Engage with the Emerging’ at the heart of the process.
