Avios: Stopping Tech From Being A Bottleneck

This case study details the work Mindera conducted as part of our collaboration with Avios, the UK’s leading aviation loyalty programme.

Overview

• Client: Avios
• Industry: Travel and Transportation
• Project type: CloudOps
• Tech used: AWS

About Avios

Avios is the leading aviation loyalty programme in the UK. Owned by the International Airline Group (IAGL), Avios is dedicated to providing its customers with a loyalty programme that gives them product and business discounts when they travel within the airlines of IAGL.

Executive summary

Mindera collaborated with Avios to stop technology from being a bottleneck for the brand. The result is that Avios can now conduct multiple releases every day, safe in the knowledge that its stability and existing traffic won’t be harmed.

Challenges

With multiple partners from different channels and different brands connecting with a single loyalty programme, Avios was looking to:

• Continue growing its partnerships with different brands.
• Execute a product roadmap including new features with minimum risk and fast iterations.
• Increase the operational stability for a smooth business-to-business experience.
• Migrate to a more scalable pay-as-you-go model.

Achieving these goals implied Avios taking a new approach to its systems. Namely, by modernising its technology stack and ways of working. Achieving it meant overcoming the following challenges:

• Innovation pace.
• Lack of knowledge.
• Lack of visibility.

Below, we’ve covered each of these challenges in detail:

Innovation pace

Operating on top of a legacy platform, the cost of change was significant. Delivery speed and release cycle was sacrificed in favour of stability. This resulted in a slower pace in releasing new features to Avios’ customers.

Lack of knowledge

Services would need to be made into cloud-native applications. Inexperience around cloud services within the existing team required expertise and leadership.

Lack of Visibility

Services needed to be current existing services only, with minimal monitoring and a lack of metrics and KPIs. Observability, particularly telemetry, was not to the desirable levels. The lack of telemetry meant that the tech teams weren’t able to fully understand how the system was performing.

Solutions

The solution was clear: Mindera needed to provide Avios’ developer teams with a modern technology platform, one capable of scaling and adding more services as the business grew, and with a developer flow that minimised deployment risks.

Fulfilling Avios requirements was achieved in multiple ways:

• Introducing continuous testing on every API endpoint.
• Migration to the cloud — moved from on-premise infrastructure to AWS ECS.
• Implementation of a service mesh to allow enforcement of network policies, as well as providing visibility into the system traffic.
• Split continuous integration and continuous delivery — allowing developers to generate versioned releases continuously, deploying specific versions following a GitOps approach having by design auditability, reproducibility, and peer-reviewed changes.
• Refactoring web services to be cloud-native applications.
• Enabling a ‘you build it, you maintain’ it culture. This was achieved by introducing deployment packages that provide specific dashboards for every service that displays metrics, logs, tracing, and service interactions.
• Introducing a release model with canaries mitigating the deployment of patches and minor changes with greater confidence and less risk.
• A predefined set of alarms for every service.
• New scalable microservices architecture defined. This included infrastructure architecture in the cloud (AWS) supporting thousands of active sessions and hundreds of transactions per second
• Implementation of GitOps using AWS ECS and AWS App Mesh.
• Service-by-service migration to the new cloud infrastructure.
• Automated performance and load testing, to increase confidence that new changes won’t degrade performance.
  

Results

As part of the aviation industry, Avios was severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The tasks carried out by Mindera enabled Avios to prepare for the reopening of international air travel.

Our work means that technology is no longer a bottleneck for Avios. This allows for multiple releases a day, without harming stability and existing traffic.

These are the key benefits that Avios received from its collaboration with Mindera:

• Ability to consistently and automatically release multiple times a day.
• Product/development teams build, maintain, and support their own products.
• Operational awareness of the tech estate has increased significantly, with visibility on system, application and business metrics flowing all the way to automated alerting tooling (PagerDuty).
• Very low impact of new releases due to canaries.
  

Looking for a tech partner? Get in touch!

Avios is one of the many companies Mindera has worked with to provide long-term solutions to significant business challenges. If you need a tech partner for your company then please get in touch with us. We’d love to collaborate with you and help your business.