Over the last few years, Amadeus has grown incredibly on different aspects by embarking on the journey to the Cloud and more in particular on Azure, Microsoft’s open and secure cloud computing system. We feel that it is important to share this experience with the world.
It has been a groundbreaking partnership for us and the travel sector at large: Azure cloud technology revolutionizes our software development cycles, data capabilities, and brings us closer to our customers. It ensures a future proof infrastructure and prioritizes collaboration with one of the world’s most trusted technology companies.
Our partnership with Microsoft is not just about accelerating our journey to the Cloud. It’s also about unleashing the next wave of innovation in the travel industry.
The goal is to take advantage of the possibilities that cloud technology offers and work together with Microsoft and the entire travel industry to transform travel. We want our customers to be able to develop truly engaging solutions on top of our technology.
Together with Microsoft, we’ve already set up an innovation program through which we are exploring and developing new travel solutions that offer a smoother and more personalized user experience.
Our journey to get here was no easy task, and it is one worth telling.
Try, test, repeat – Our first explorations with the Cloud
It all started back in2016 , when we decided that the next wave of innovation in travel required a whole new way to run and manage our applications and services. We began to find ways to effectively move our workload to the public cloud by deploying caching-like applications and handling read-only traffic. This allowed us to check the viability of the Cloud for our applications, to learn about the cloud environment, and to start offloading some of our resource-hungry workloads out of our datacenter.
With knowledge acquired by our cloud experts during this time and several successful proof of concept applications, Amadeus was ready to take on a challenge that was extraordinary in size and scale.
The Stakes – this wasn’t a project for the faint of heart
To really grasp the scope of what we wanted to accomplish, one must understand that Amadeus is a company with 16,000 employees worldwide, hosting mission critical services that allow millions of passengers to board flights each year –that’s 60 passengers per second—and since we power more than 1,500 airports around the world, boarding never stops. Amadeus’ manages large amounts of search traffic which might have changes that happen in real time. It might well happen that, at the very same time that anyone is looking for a flight from London to New York, any given airline is adding a new flight for that route. Since such a flight might change the overall price for the traveler, it is important that we provide this information in real time.
Real-time systems like the one depicted above are complex to build and they could very easily change the impact on our customers. For these reasons, the stakes are incredibly high, not just for Amadeus, but for all our partners across the travel industry and, more importantly, the travelers. Therefore, when we started contemplating moving mission-critical applications with both read and write traffic, that’s when the real challenge began, andMicrosoft was up for the challenge.
Because of all the above, if Amadeus was to migrate all its services and applications to the Cloud, it was imperative to build good architecture and building blocks to support us in the future.
The Challenge – Reimagining 30 years of architecture for modern cloud systems
Our partners at Microsoft immediately realized that generic recommendations could not be applied to Amadeus.Amadeus applications are not self-contained;theyare highly dependent on each other as theyconstitute a very largeintegrated end-to-end distributed travel system.Amadeus has extremely stringent resiliency constraints, performance challenges, and inter-dependenciesbetween software components. After 30 plus years of development, our solutions have become extremely efficient and perform well, but cloud technology offers us endless new possibilities to improve them even more. For example, we could now reengineer them into smaller components to extract more benefits from the value of the Cloud. Additionally, our more recent applications were built following new architecture paradigms that are less monolithic and much closer to aCloud Native Application.
Nonetheless, our migration strategy encompassed all Amadeus applications and thus we worked (and continue to) with Microsoft to fit its architectural best practices to all our use cases.
The Result: The Amadeus One Platform
After two years of work with Microsoft, the result is the creation of two Platforms that are used in Amadeus: our brand-new Creation Platform and the Cloud Platform. Both of them combined form what we call the Amadeus Open Platform. We will start to focus on the foundation: the Cloud Platform. All two of them are cloud based, and combined they form what we call the Amadeus One Platform, which powers our relationships and services across the travel sector, spanning everything from airlines, to airports, travel agents, hotels and more.
Our Foundation: The Technical Platform
At the heart of it all is our Technical Platform. This is the foundation on which all other Amadeus systems are built, it hosts all applications and enables everything including our Data and Application platforms.
The design of our Technical Platform was built using theAzure Cloud Adoption framework —which includes guidance and best practices that helped us confidentlyadoptthecloudand achieve our business outcomes—combined withAzure Enterprise Scale Architecture , which represents a strategic design path and target technical state for our ideal Azure environment. But this wasn’t simply a paint by numbers situation. A lot of effort was made to ensure that the design would work in "real life" situations, by using real application deployment and critical use cases.
Our testing touched on many different areas of interest: Identity & Access Management, Management Group & Subscription Organization, Landing Zone, Network Connectivity, Containerization Services, Database Services, Security, Infrastructure as Code, Resiliency andService Level Agreements (SLA),FinOps and Test Systems.
Among these areas of interest, Identity & Access Management was of particular importance, due to its position at the core of what we do.
Zero Trust: How we protect Identity & Access Management (IAM)
Innovation in travel is irrelevant if it can’t be done with complete security. As a result, Identity & Access Management (IAM) is one of the core design areas that we focused on when building our technical platform. Even more with the Public Cloud, the concepts ofZero Trust (a strategic approach to cybersecurity that secures an organization by eliminating implicit trust and continuously validating every stage of a digital interaction) areof critical importance in thecurrent technological era to ensure the right level of protection against threats to our services and our data. Passenger details and credit card information must be protected at all costs – there is no room for vulnerability.
To achieve it, we are combining the power of Azure and Microsoft Active Directories to give the technical cloudusersthe full range of toolsand authentication protocolsthat they need to secure their environment, including Azure Privilege Identity Management, Multi-Factor Authentication, Conditional Access and many more services.
The challenge was bigger for the move of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) workloads in the Cloud. However, thanks to Azure tools, we introduced security layers whichhelp us to delegatethe different permissions and role assignments, aka Role Based Access Control (RBAC) to the owners of the resources thus answering PCI DSS requirements in this area.
Finally, it is important to make the distinction between our IAM and the Customer Identity Access Management (CIAM) strategy. They are both following the same principles, but the technologies used are different; we will cover this topic in a later blog post.
This is just the beginning
Thanks to our transition to the Cloud, Amadeus is now able to innovate and provide even greater services for the travel industry with more speed, security, and agility. We’ve only started to scratch the surface of what we can achieve with the cloud, and with partners at Microsoft Azure.
This is just the beginning of our story. Stay tuned for more details on how Azure has helped us make great progress with other key areas including Management Group and Subscription Organization, and the Landing Zone for Amadeus, where we deploy applications and their immediate dependencies. Thisis the intersection of three dimensions: Security, Governance and Network.
Come back to read about all this and much more as we explore the many dimensions of Amadeus and how we have used Microsoft Azure to pave the future of innovation in travel thanks to our migration to the Cloud.
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