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In this blog post, we explore the transformative journey of a leading loyalty company associated with a major airline, which we will refer to as “SkyRewards.” With partnerships spanning over fifty airlines and a customer base of more than 21.8 million active users, SkyRewards aimed to enhance service delivery through a serverless-first strategy, ultimately improving agility and customer experience.
The Challenge SkyRewards Faced
SkyRewards sought to streamline operations while creating a more agile and responsive system to elevate the traveler’s experience. Their existing application deployment relied on clusters, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, and Docker containers. Despite the benefits these technologies offered, they also brought challenges, including a significant overhead in infrastructure management. The fluctuating scalability demands, particularly during promotional campaigns that generated sudden spikes in traffic, posed a considerable challenge.
Additionally, their infrastructure required constant oversight from the SkyRewards team, with ongoing configuration management, patching, and security measures leading to a heavy workload.
Transitioning to Serverless on AWS
SkyRewards initiated their serverless-first strategy with their rewards program app, yielding remarkable results. They integrated various AWS services, including:
- Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate: This service enabled SkyRewards to handle pricing transactions related to domestic and international flights, seat purchases, baggage allowances, and other products. The architecture allowed for rapid and autonomous scalability to meet business demands, particularly during promotional periods. AWS conducted a proof-of-concept to confirm that Fargate could meet their requirements without the burden of infrastructure management, which facilitated the migration of multiple production workloads.
- AWS Lambda: To address the needs of their large customer base, SkyRewards implemented AWS Lambda, an event-driven serverless computing platform. All connections between their frontend applications and middleware were architected using Lambda alongside Amazon API Gateway. This setup enabled rapid integrations with partners and data lake processes, allowing them to handle over 500 requests per second during peak times without the need for infrastructure management.
- Amazon EventBridge: The company utilized Amazon EventBridge to connect with its SaaS applications, enabling workflows for customer support and business operations. This approach allowed SkyRewards to create a decoupled application architecture with enhanced flexibility to adjust business rules as needed.
- Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS: These services facilitated seamless integration with partner processes, ensuring controlled queuing and notifications in case of processing failures.
Revamping the Checkout Process
Building on the success of the serverless approach within their rewards program, SkyRewards decided to redesign their checkout architecture using serverless services.
Customers interact with AWS services through various digital channels—such as Portal, Chat, or Marketplace—to execute SkyRewards processes. The checkout flow integrates with external services, including Sabre, which handles airline ticket generation for the airline. The core business case is detailed as follows:
- Customers access a digital channel frontend, utilizing a portal supported by Akamai and Liferay.
- They manage their cart using CRUD operations via APIs on API Gateway, with Auth0 tokens ensuring authenticated access.
- After completing cart operations, customers proceed to checkout, where AWS Step Functions, Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB orchestrate workflows and data interactions.
- The order processing flow is event-driven, utilizing EventBridge to ensure proper sequencing.
Outcomes
Adopting a serverless-first model represented a significant shift for SkyRewards in application development and management, yielding numerous benefits. Notably, they experienced enhanced cost efficiency, as the pay-as-you-go model reduced infrastructure maintenance expenses. During peak events like holidays, this financial advantage became evident. Additionally, 50 percent of their Lambda functions now run on ARM-based AWS Graviton2 processors, delivering improved performance at lower costs.
The serverless architecture also provided SkyRewards with greater agility, allowing them to seamlessly manage traffic spikes without manual intervention. They now process over 20 million searches daily and have achieved a 50 percent faster time-to-market for new features and applications. This transformation empowered development teams to concentrate on coding rather than system administration tasks.
SkyRewards’ decision to embrace a serverless framework was both a technological and strategic maneuver, ensuring the company remains flexible in a dynamic digital landscape.
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Conclusion
SkyRewards’ commitment to a serverless architecture has not just modernized their operations but strategically positioned them to thrive in a fast-paced digital environment.