IDeaS – Driving Evolution and Innovation with AWS

How the world leader in hospitality and travel revenue management leveraged AWS scale for rapid growth and built for the future.

IDeaS’ Challenge

As one of the earliest pioneers of multi-tenant SaaS offerings, IDeaS market-leading core SaaS platform has been leveraging private and hybrid clouds for over 20 years, but rapid growth created new challenges in scaling the current data center and application development strategy. In addition, immensely successful product portfolio expansion efforts required a new and faster product development pace.

Because of this explosive growth, onboarding new customers necessitated additional capital expenditures in the form of hardware purchases and investments in data center management capacity. Additionally, a faster, more agile, and elastic production release cycle was needed that would remove constraints across more than 30 different components.

IDeaS’ relentless focus on the customer experience required a solution to alleviate potential performance degradation during releases and code merges. In addition to the increase in velocity and performance monitoring, key partners were changing billing models that required a more granular and accurate level of data center cost tracking and call differentiation.

The Solution

Leveraging existing AWS governance provided by its parent company SAS, the IDeaS team knew they needed a strong partner to help the team focus and accelerate. IDeaS invited DataArt, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and technology provider of more than 3 years, to partner in IDeaS’ migration. These frameworks and the partnership with DataArt helped accelerate and focus solely on workload migration.

Laying a Foundation 

The first steps were designed to take advantage of the existing managed AWS environment. This included using Amazon Cognito to support managed authentication for web and mobile clients. Other management features included application permissions and feature flagging based on purchased subscription profiles. This was a key piece to providing greater financial granularity, but also introduced a much more expeditious process for onboard and replicating user profiles. For this process, Amazon RDS and DynamoDB critical.

Migration Strategy: Containerization Creates Massive Repeatability and Speed

IDeaS and DataArt then continued with assessment, design, planning, and execution details for the workload migrations. The joint team was able to refactor existing code written in Java to streamline the migration process. DataArt led the migration of existing Java components and then standardized workload deployment and operations through containerization.

After proof-of-concept implementations and iterations, an architecture leveraging AWS ECR to store container images, and Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate to deploy and run the containers, was chosen.

Once the approach was proven out with its first successful migrations, the team was then able to rapidly repeat the pattern for the rest of the components. This approach streamlined the process and accelerated migration timelines, ultimately accelerating IDeaS’ time to market by months. 

As the platform was containerized, engineering teams gained the ability to release to production without resource contention or team dependencies. Infrastructure management, redeployment, and scaling became entirely automated.

The following release process was the result:

Comprehensive Approach 

To enable successful end-to-end migration, the DataArt and IDeaS team took a comprehensive approach leveraging both AWS and third party services, including: 

• Remote access from IDeaS networks to AWS networks provided by AWS VPN
• Customer-authentication leveraging Cognito  
• Customer access through AWS Application Load Balancer or AWS API Gateway
• Modernized existing relational databases for direct migration to AWS RDS
• Migration of on-prem NoSQL solution based on MongoDB to MongoDB Atlas in AWS 
• RabbitMQ migration to CloudAMPQ with peered VPC
• Infrastructure built out with Terraform 
• Continuous integration improvement through BitBucket Git repository and BitBucket Pipeline
• Support multi-availability zone capable VPCs supporting public and private subnets through AWS Fargate services 

Outcomes 

• IDeaS and DataArt’s approach enabled incredibly fast workload migration to ensure efficiency, repeatability, and reliability, drastically minimizing code changes.
• By leveraging cloud-native containerization capabilities offered by AWS, IDeaS was able to benefit from automatic scalability, elasticity, performance, and high availability native to AWS cloud. 
• Increased capacity scaling, as well as reduced IT organizational strain during demand spike by leveraging AWS-managed services. 
• Improved team productivity and release velocity (up to several production releases in a single day), resulting in increased business agility.
• Account-specific billing and greater financial reporting granularity through this new native AWS approach.

Partner Information

DataArt is an IT consultancy company that designs, develops and supports software solutions and operates from 20+ locations in the US, Europe, Argentina, and the UAE.

AWS architecture includes AWS services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Relational Database Service, and Amazon Simple Storage Services.

When combined with IDeaS Optix, AWS helps hospitality professionals uncover trends in their data and conduct real-time analysis across properties, segments, and rate codes. 

AWS architecture improves the performance and stability of IDeaS solutions while implementing changes and client requests more quickly. 

AWS services used include: AWS Fargate, Amazon ECS, Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, AWS Application Load Balancer, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Cognito, Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, Amazon VPC, AWS Client VPN, Amazon Route 53, AWS Transit Gateway, VPC Peering, Amazon ECR, AWS IAM, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Config, AD Connector