Zero-downtime migration of airline booking systems to AWS

The client

Air Peace — aviation, Lagos, Nigeria.

The challenge

Air Peace ran its booking engine integrations, crew and operations tools and public website on ageing hardware in a single data centre. Capacity could not follow demand during holiday peaks, hardware failures caused outages, and disaster recovery was a manual, untested procedure.

What we did

We designed an AWS landing zone with the airline's security team, rehearsed the migration three times in a staging environment and cut over in one planned weekend window.

• Multi-account AWS landing zone with private networking to partner systems
• Databases replicated continuously to AWS before cutover, then switched with a tested rollback plan
• Auto-scaling web tier behind a CDN for the public website and check-in
• Cross-region disaster recovery with automated failover and quarterly drills
• Infrastructure as code and CI/CD so future changes go through review

Results

Booking and check-in stayed online throughout the migration. The website handles peak-season traffic three times faster, and the airline now has a recovery plan it has actually tested.

They migrated our booking systems to AWS over a single weekend with zero downtime. That is the kind of execution we expected, and got.
— Head of IT, Air Peace