The challenge: Cloud migration

Star Alliance is the world's largest global airline alliance, with 26 member airlines serving over 1,200 airports across 197 countries.

It aims to provide a comprehensive network that allows members global reach, enabling them to provide seamless travel experiences to customers.

To keep pace with the changing industry dynamics Star Alliance was looking to:

• Streamline service delivery of application management lifecycle

• Reduce provisioning timelines

• Ensure disaster recovery for applications and data

• Accelerate the development of new features and capabilities for its products

• Deliver cutting-edge customer experiences

Star Alliance was not only looking to achieve IT operational efficiencies but also to digitally transform its applications. To improve business resilience, Star Alliance identified over 10 mission-critical applications. Migrating these applications to cloud would enable auto-scaling of storage services according to demand, reduce operational overheads, harness intelligent tiering of data on cloud, and support multiple passenger queries.

The solution: TCS leverages AWS

Star Alliance’s strategic partnership with TCS spans over 15 years. TCS was brought on board to modernize Star Alliance’s growing IT landscape and drive digital innovation

During this partnership journey, TCS and Star Alliance have co-developed several industry-first solutions to enhance customers’ travel experience. With its contextual knowledge and agile methods, TCS designed and developed these solutions and helped achieve significant speed to market.

TCS leveraged AWS cloud for cloud migration to align Star Alliance’s IT infrastructure with its business objectives. TCS adopted native AWS cloud offerings and technologies such as serverless, CICD, containerization, database, open source, and new AI and ML-powered cloud services to enable faster and intelligent cloud storage and application modernization.

With seamless cloud migration, Star Alliance introduced services such as interline flight transfer assistant and instant loyalty miles accrual across member carriers. Amazon Aurora powers Star Alliance’s industry-first baggage tracking application. It processes data from multiple airline baggage systems and offers visible dashboards and centralized reporting to allow airline customer service agents to track bags at airports around the world.

TCS leveraged key cloud storage services such as: 

• Amazon S3 as the primary data backup location to store PaaS resource access logs, audit logs, and object files

• Amazon EBS Volumes as the primary data storage for EC2 instances

• Amazon Glacier as a cost-effective storage location, transitioning old data from S3

• Amazon RDS for data migrated from on-premise Oracle database 

• Commvault (third-party tool) to create data backups; snapshots stored in S3 Expedite application deployments by leveraging Amazon Elastic Container Service with AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers

• ScienceLogic (third-party tool) to monitor the overall cloud infrastructure