The Opportunity
Global travel and tourism is a trillion dollar industry, and in this highly competitive market, value-added offerings for customers is the major point of differentiation – standing out from the crowd is critical for success. For our client to maintain their position among the market leaders, a complete digital transformation of its IT infrastructure and systems was imperative. The travel tech enterprise needed a new deployment approach for their Windows applications that would help them innovate faster in response to changing customer needs across their enterprise. SourceFuse recommended that the client migrate and modernize their Windows workloads on AWS, offering all the benefits that come with moving from on-premise to the cloud.
Key Challenges
Originally, the company’s .NET-based applications were hosted on-premises data centers. Due to this, a lot of time was spent managing the infrastructure, and as the company grew this process became even more difficult, hindering their ability to quickly scale with demand.
Given that the applications were processing millions of transactions and updates per day, aggregating and updating the client’s systems via the existing infrastructure was proving a real challenge. The entire process consisted of lengthy deployment cycles and a heavy maintenance downtime, resulting in efficiency roadblocks.Â
Along with the complex infrastructure for the application workloads, the client was also burdened with high costs associated with Windows licenses. Even though licensing costs are unavoidable when it comes to running Windows applications, SourceFuse was keen to explore and recommend possible options for optimizing costs as part of its digital modernization strategy.
The Solution
As part of the analysis phase, SourceFuse evaluated the customer’s existing application configuration, and proposed methods to balance traffic load with zero downtime. A clear roadmap was developed, and in collaboration with the key stakeholders this helped the client to visualize the full potential of a Windows Modernization.
To standardize the IT infrastructure in the cloud, containerization emerged as an attractive solution because of its agility, scalability, and potential for automation across environments. SourceFuse implemented a new containerized Windows-based environment on AWS Cloud, quickly executing a secure Windows migration, keeping in mind industry best practices. All the applications were modernized from .NET Framework to .NET Core, enabling them to run on Linux infrastructure and which also resolved their Windows licensing concerns.
Furthermore, SourceFuse’s modernization expertise enabled them to increase agility leveraging an open and flexible cloud platform. Owing to their high rate of user transactions per day, deploying AWS Lambda offered unlimited scalability for their high volume applications, now operating on .NET Core Framework. Since modernization, each application now has its own deployment unit as well as auto-launch capability of the hosting platforms (AWS Lambda and Amazon EKS).
Results and Benefits
The client was able to quickly realize the benefits, and significant improvements gained, from a cost-optimized and automated capacity-adjusted environment, with a zero-downtime deployment policy:
- 99.99% Availability: Web API deployed over AWS Lambda is highly available, failure of one request does not affect another
- Improved Fault Tolerance: Each application has its own separate deployment unit, as per the microservices architecture, improving reliability
- Cost Reduction: Usage cost as per resource allocation and time, along with licensing costs reduction with Windows platform removal
- Increased Scalability: AWS Lambda offered unlimited scalability for their high volume applications, now operating on .NET Core Framework
About The Customer
As one of the top travel technology companies, our customer empowers every segment of the travel and hospitality industry with real-time intelligence, connectivity to the largest demand and supply network, as well as targeted digital marketing solutions.
Trusted by multiple Fortune 500 Travel and Hospitality companies in the world, they offer a comprehensive suite of SaaS based products designed to enable their customer base to become digital-future & market ready.
