Airfare Consolidation Company Seeks Cloud Hosting Upgrades
Trianz worked with a global airfare consolidation services company in response to growing technical, performance, and reliability problems on its cloud services platform. The customer experience (CX) was suffering as service availability faltered, and the company had expended much time and capital fighting recurring IT fires.
Challenges for the Airfare Consolidation Company Stemmed from Cloud Hosting
The airfare consolidation services company's current cloud hosting platform suffered from a lack of scalability. Since demand peaks led to server overutilization and resource scarcity, customer demand fluctuated wildly on its cloud platform. The result for customers was slow, sluggish, or unavailable services.
To troubleshoot the issues, the company needed to map and document its entire application suite. Unfortunately, it lacked knowledge of the intricacies of its network and architecture, making it difficult to identify and remediate the root cause of service problems.
The company required a digital transformation that introduced 24x7 elastic auto-scaling or resource provisioning in response to demand and monitoring to keep scaling costs under control. They also needed alerts whenever auto-scaling was activated, to monitor and proactively plan for peaks in demand.
Technology Components Used on AWS Hosting Platform
With help from the Trianz cloud experts, the company decided on the following technology components:
Windows Server was used, as the cloud platform relied on .NET and Microsoft SQL to operate.
.NET Framework enabled application interoperability in the cloud for developers, working cross-platform and on an open-source basis.
MS SQL was used for its compatibility with .NET and Windows, functioning as a database solution for the airfare cloud application.
Application Load Balancers were implemented in the cloud environment to monitor for and remediate peaks in service demand.
Application Caching Engines were used to reduce bandwidth and processing requirements by serving pre-loaded data to users from edge data centers.
Web Application Firewalls were implemented to monitor and protect the network against HTTP and HTTPS traffic, along with RESTful requests and other traffic.
A Content Delivery Network was built to store and serve audio, image, and video assets to users with greater efficiency and response times than the previous solution.
Enterprise DNS Services were configured to map application server IP addresses, redirect traffic to the old platform, and ensure full accessibility for users.
A Virtual Private Network was configured to encrypt data in transit between the cloud servers and platform users, alongside improving cybersecurity for employees working remotely.
Audit Logs were configured and activated to ensure all changes were monitored, tracked, and held to account.
Airfare Platform Development and Implementation with Trianz
Using the above solutions, Trianz cloud experts began with an assessment of platform requirements and how much processing capacity was needed to ensure a smooth and reliable operation of the airfare platform. Trianz measured this using application performance management (APM) tools, which drilled down at the process level to identify CPU, RAM, and storage utilization metrics.
The Trianz cloud experts then deployed a new architecture on AWS as the client's platform of choice. Here, network design took place to allow access through firewalls, DNS subnet masks, and the overarching VPN service used for security. This included routing for the caching engines and load balancers, both of which increased response times and overall availability.
Finally, a monitoring system was implemented that operates 24x7 and sends real-time alerts to IT personnel in reference to outages, bottlenecks, security risks, and overspend with the airfare application platform.
Transformational Effects and Impact
After implementation, the airfare services platform was capable of auto-scaling and auto-remediation in response to peaks and troughs in network demand. The entire platform was benchmarked and stress-tested to analyze performance under load and ensure auto-scaling worked effectively. Multiple layers were created within the platform, each with its own auto-scaling ruleset for more granular control and greater cost savings.
After the infrastructure was in place, the Trianz experts made detailed documentation to guide the airfare company’s IT team in the future. This included how to set up the cloud infrastructure, blueprints for ease of deployment, and how to configure various service integrations required by the platform.
Today, the airfare company has a resilient digital-first platform that can auto-scale to meet demand. Cybersecurity was improved with a VPN and firewall services. Caching, load balancing, and content delivery networks improved performance and response times for users, enhancing the overall customer experience (CX). Future development or configuration work on the cloud platform, both internally and externally, can now be tracked thanks to audit logs tied to specific user accounts on AWS.
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Trianz enables digital transformations through effective strategies and excellence in execution. Collaborating with business and technology leaders, we help formulate and execute operational strategies to achieve intended business outcomes by bringing the best of consulting, technology expertise, and execution models.
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