Top U.S. airline flies above the clouds with printing-as-a-service - Ascendion

Top U.S. airline flies above the clouds with printing-as-a-service

Ascendion January 17, 2022

Even when everything is digital, airlines still need to print a sky high amount, like boarding passes and baggage tags to flight and passenger manifests and more. The printing process needs to be seamless for on-time service and customer satisfaction, plus scalable to handle traffic spikes.

A major U.S. airline wanted to modernize its airport printing services to scale individual print jobs for both customers and ground staff. Their existing monolithic application was difficult to scale and not equipped to handle increased volume when more flights were coming in and out. The system weaknesses led to frequent printing outages and contributed to flight delays and rescheduling — resulting in huge losses for the airline.

Scalable print-as-a-service

Ascendion engineers architected a microservices solution for application modernization and scalability for print-job level service We designed a unified consumable “print-as-a- service” that could be called by all airport systems. The product-like architecture pattern is repeatable and extendable to multiple modules within the airport. The unified service app used a model-driven architecture, making it interoperable with all airport applications. The AWS infrastructure architecture provided fault tolerance, scalability, high availability, and disaster recovery. In addition, we visualized a seamless and enhanced experience for customers at kiosks and service desks.

Millisecond processing time

We engineered a solution that made printing fast, reliable, secure and scalable for the airline. The solution reduced the processing time to milliseconds in the print system by integrating cloud-based features. The advanced monitoring features allowed support teams to be anticipate and catch issues instead of being reactive after the problem surfaced.

  • $3 million savings by eliminating printing system outages
  • 99.99% increase in application reliability
  • 50k to 2 million messages per minute scalability range

Tech Stack: AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, CloudWatch, EKS, IBM MQ, Kibana with ElastiCache, Kubernetes cluster on AWS EC2, NET Core, SQS

 

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