Serverless Micro-services in Event-Driven Architecture Supports Up To 3 Million Daily Searches

A leading private aviation technology company that provides an advanced Flight Management System (“FMS”) for private aircraft owners, operators, management companies, charter brokers, and flight departments was acquired by its now parent organization. 

The acquisition allowed the parent organization to accelerate the development of its digital Charter Marketplace, seamlessly connecting a real-time supply of aircraft to over 6,000 members across North America. With three affiliate airline operators using the organization’s FMS platform for managing their aircraft fleet, it was imperative to improve the operator’s ability to service customers. The parent org also wanted the ability to increase resource utilization (aircraft and crew) and aircraft availability search capabilities across affiliates.  

AIM Consulting presented a solution architecture and implementation plan addressing both technical expectations in terms of scalability and performance of the APIs, and the business need and up-leveling the organization’s technical expertise within this technology space.  

Key Results

Situation

With each organization’s systems isolated, the operator tracked the fleet’s aircraft independently due to privacy and security design. The challenge became transforming the data at rest from fleet management information to a RESTful API with searchable availability information. The company needed to re-architect its system(s) and relied on AIM Consulting’s expertise to design and develop the solution.

This was truly exciting work. It’s gratifying when you can design and build a system that lets a company innovate and create new business opportunities.

Principal Consultant, Application Development at AIM Consulting

Results

The Parent organization is beginning their internal beta of the API to improve customer satisfaction and drive higher resource utilization. The system automatically monitors issues, sends notifications and identifies the source of the problem instantly. The deployment pipeline is designed to deploy changes quickly and fully automated, test frequently and update the production system in minutes instead of days, therefore streamlining development. 

The project enabled the organization’s team to increase operational capacity, lay the foundation for analyzing search patterns, and demonstrated best practices for operational excellence. It also aided in maturing their expertise on cloud platforms and increasing the organization’s confidence in the ability to meet demand. 

AIM’s Approach

To support the usability and performance expectations, AIM Consulting created Serverless Microservice Architecture in the Azure Cloud. This architecture collects events in real-time from all enrolled partners to calculate and store a catalog of available resources. It was designed for high availability – auto-scaling on demand and failing over to multiple regions and has a built-in, completely automated, deployment system using Azure DevOps. The system design is capable of supporting a load of over 3,000,000 searches a day, but scales elastically so low volume periods do not incur high costs.

AIM Consulting delivered this solution by undertaking a solution architecture phase where the business requirements around security, availability, and serviceability were combined with the desired functionality to create a set of proposed architectures and recommendations on the best path forward. 

Next came the implementation phase. AIM Consulting built the system using DevOps best practices around CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) for automated deployments, and observability (including logging, tracing, and monitoring) from the ground up. The AIM Consulting team worked in agile sprints delivering work at the end of every sprint to stakeholders.