Emirates Flies High After Massive AWS Migration

Before migrating its core booking engine and other Tier 1 applications to AWS, Emirates relied on third-party colocation centers hosting Emirates-owned hardware. This hardware was approaching end of life and becoming expensive to maintain. A move to the cloud promised many benefits and avoided large capital expenditure. A core team of just six people was managing a huge, monolithic, and dated set of applications. But those applications were critical for the business, so downtime was not an option.

In addition to the migration, Emirates took the opportunity to fully transform several services within their application stack, including Windows, Linux RHEL and SQL servers. Roshan D’Souza, technical team lead at Emirates, says: “We are obsessed with doing the right thing, and we knew there was application technical debt to address. Moving to the cloud made achieving this objective a much easier process.”

There was a hard-and-fast deadline—an expected peak in demand for bookings in July 2020, although COVID-19 flattened that demand. Winning over Emirates’ risk-conscious leadership was tough at first, but made easier with the company's history of working with AWS on other projects. And support only grew as more and more workloads were moved without disruption, and performance of those applications improved.

Like most airlines, Emirates deals with seasonal peaks and troughs. Running its own data centers meant paying for underused capacity to cope with these peaks. And it took about 10 weeks to procure, set up, test, and deploy a new physical server. With AWS, that process takes a couple of hours. Spinning up a new virtual machine now takes an hour, compared to six weeks. The move to AWS also meant Emirates could rapidly scale down its systems when COVID-19 and travel restrictions caused passenger numbers to collapse.

Emirates had suffered from physical data center limitations with their previous data center provider and struggled to find problems through its opaque systems and interfaces with third-party networks. In addition, time to market for new features was painfully slow, and it was impossible to experiment to embrace a DevOps culture. The Emirates security team had limited control over the colocation infrastructure, and security investigations were manual and labor intensive. For Emirates customers, this all added up to slow online booking processes via the website and mobile devices.

The team migrated workloads from one geographical region at a time to ensure consistent performance. Milestones were planned around low-risk services first, to build business confidence and provide an opportunity to learn and respond. The project was launched in September 2019, with one data center migrated by November 2019 and the other by May 2020. This became more complicated after COVID-19 hit because Emirates shifted to home working and accessing colocation centers became difficult. AWS-native solutions—including AWS Database Migration Service for SQL databases—were used to sync, replicate, and transfer data. Bidirectional replication ensured that Emirates’ platform would continue working perfectly as applications were migrated.

With Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Emirates was able to easily provision file storage for its CMS (SDL Tridion) to store files for the booking website. The fully managed Amazon FSx provides greater performance and reliability compared to Emirates’ on-premises data center. It also improved security by ensuring data is encrypted at every stage. Aneesh Rasheed, principal engineer at Emirates, says: “The core team’s insight and willingness to learn about these new AWS tools meant that previous unknowns were soon rectified, making implementing solutions that much simpler for the business.”