Volotea MRO Modernization in AWS
AWS Architecture BlogVolotea MRO Modernization in AWSby Albert Capdevila and Alfonso Simó | on29 NOV 2021| inAmazon AppStream 2.0,Amazon EC2,Architecture,AWS Systems Manager,AWS Transfer Family,Travel and Hospitality|Permalink|ShareVoloteais one of the fastest growing independent airlines in Europe, and has increased its fleet, routes, and number of available seats year over year. Volotea has already transported more than 30 million passengers across Europe since 2012, and has bases in 16 European capitals.The maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) application is a critical system for every airline. It’s used to manage the maintenance, repair, service, and inspection of aircraft. The main goal of an MRO application is to ensure the safety and airworthiness of the aircraft. Traditionally, those systems have been based on monolithic, packaged applications. However, these are difficult to scale and do not offer the benefit of elasticity to adapt to changing demand. Volotea migrated toAmazon Web Services (AWS)to modernize their MRO without refactoring the code. In this blog post, we’ll show you an architecture solution that can be applied to modernize an MRO (or similarly packaged monolithic application) without refactoring, and discuss some considerations.The challenges with an on-premises MRO solutionVolotea’s MRO software previously ran in an on-premises data center. The system was based on Windows, an outdated database engine, and a virtual desktop system based on Citrix. Costs were fixed, yet MRO usage is typically seasonal. All the interfaces with other systems were based on an outdated communications protocol. This presented security concerns, especially considering that ransomware attacks are an increasing threat.The main challenge for Volotea was adapting the MRO system to changing business requirements. Seasonal workloads and high impact projects, like changing fleets from Boeing to Airbus, require flexibility. The company also needed to adapt to the changing protocols necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as airlines are one of the most impacted industries in Europe.Volotea needed to modernize the operating system (OS) and database, simplify the end user application access, and increase the overall platform security, including integration with other applications.Modernizing the MRO without refactoringFollowingVolotea’s cloud strategy, the MRO system was migrated in 2 months to AWS to reduce technology costs and gain higher operational performance, availability, security, and flexibility. The migration was not simply based on a lift-and-shift approach, but used an existing AWS reference architecture for the MRO system. This reference architecture incorporates AWS managed services to modernize the application without incurring refactoring costs.Figure 1. Volotea MRO deployment in a multi-account architectureAs shown in the high-level architecture in Figure 1:Volotea migrated their servers toAmazon EC2instances based on Linux, to minimize the OS costs. The database management system is now using an open source engine. Those changes have permitted saving more than €10K yearly in licenses.The user access technology was migrated toAmazon AppStream 2.0. This is a managed service with increased security, elasticity, and flexibility compared to traditional virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions. Volotea aligned the cost with therealusage and decreased the TCO by configuringAuto Scaling fleets, reducing the workplace costs by 50%.AWS Transfer Familywas used to centralize the information exchanged with third-party applications, while increasing the security of the communication channel. This managed service enabled the migration of the SFTP, FTPS, and FTP interfaces without the need to manage servers.To modernize the access of the MRO administrators,AWS Systems Manager Session Managerwas used. This provided an ideal browser-based shell access without requiring bastion hosts or opening SSH ports in the Amazon EC2 instances.The AWS services were linked to Volotea’s user directory usingAWS Single Sign-On. This allowed users to authenticate with their corporate credentials, decreasing maintenance costs, and increasing the security.The application was deployed in Volotea’sAWS Landing Zone, which included the following services:AWS Control Towerto set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment.AWS Transit Gatewayto facilitate the networking and routing between different VPCs, accounts, and on-premises environments.AWS Direct Connectto establish a dedicated network to AWS.To make the systems management homogeneous,AWS Systems ManagerandAWS Backupoffered a single management point for the backup policies, system inventory, and patching.Incorporating high availability to the MROOnce this initial modernization is finished, Volotea will use the AWS reference architecture for high availability (HA) to increase resiliency. They’ll configure Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling with application failover to another Availability Zone and the DB native replication mechanisms. This will useElastic IP addressesto remap the endpoints in a failover scenario. This architecture can be easily implemented in AWS to incorporate HA to applications that do not natively support horizontal scaling.ConclusionVolotea successfully modernized its MRO software, which has given them greater flexibility, elasticity, and the increased security of AWS services. They intend to continue with their digital transformation journey. Volotea is increasing its capacity to innovate faster to deliver new digital services more efficiently and with reduced IT costs. The AWS services and strategies discussed in this blog post can be applied to other similarly packaged applications to implement a first level of modernization with little effort and low migration risk.References:AWS Travel & Hospitality Resources, (includes reference architectures)6 Strategies for Migrating Applications to the CloudTAGS:MROAlbert CapdevilaAlbert Capdevila is an AWS Solutions Architect based in sunny Barcelona, helping customers build their AWS workloads according to best practices. After more than 15 years of working in projects around integration architectures, he’s now focused on ML and the cloud, considering them as the new normal. Albert is currently trying to generate a forecasting model to know how much free time his sons will leave him to go climb mountains.Alfonso SimóAlfonso Simó is IT Manager at Volotea, a fast-growing airline in Europe. Based in Barcelona, he is now focused on the modernization of the infrastructures and processes in Volotea. Passionate about technology and people well-being, he balances his human resources and technology backgrounds with training and engineering experience in retail, entrepreneurship, and airline operations. You can find him alternately playing with his children or his Raspberry Pi computers.
Volotea is one of the fastest growing independent airlines in Europe, and has increased its fleet, routes, and number of available seats year over year. Volotea has already transported more than 30 million passengers across Europe since 2012, and has bases in 16 European capitals. The maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) application is a critical […]
Albert Capdevila
Amazon AppStream 2.0 Amazon EC2 Architecture AWS Systems Manager AWS Transfer Family Travel and Hospitality