The Rail Delivery Group (RDG) brings Britain’s railway operators together to deliver real improvements in customer experience.
CLIENT
Rail Delivery Group
INDUSTRY
Transport
SERVICE
Cloud
PARTNER
aws
The client
RDG provides support and gives voice to freight and passenger operators, as well as the delivery of important national ticketing, information and reservation services for passengers and staff on behalf of member companies.
This case study can also be found over at Colibri Digital, part of The Nasstar Group.
The challenges
While the solution had performed well during this time, several technical constraints were identified in the event of a database failure. Significant support overheads were also present as Nasstar was required to self-manage a MySQL database on a set of EC2 instances.
An opportunity was identified to bring the LSM database up to date with the latest technologies and improve aspects of the existing solution, including its replication and failover capabilities.
This would involve migrating the existing LSM database to the Amazon Aurora service to leverage the many benefits of a cloud-native Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) solution.
Our goal
The outcome
The migration to the cloud-native Amazon Aurora service mitigated the risks associated with the previous replication and failover capability. Amazon Aurora allows for the provisioning of managed database backups and routine patching/maintenance schedules. Additionally, any existing technical debt has been removed.
The Amazon Aurora service has reduced the outage time in the event of a database failure from around 30 minutes to approximately 80 seconds.
Leveraging the benefits of cloud-native services has reduced the operational overhead costs associated with the previous approach of a self-managed solution hosted on EC2.
The new, modern relational database service offers high performance at scale, improving on the performance reported with the previous solution.
Amazon Aurora’s CloudWatch metrics and alarms have provided enhanced database monitoring and alerting capabilities. Performance Insights are enabled on the production database to further expand on the monitoring features. This helps RDG to further illustrate and help analyse cluster performance.
"RDG and Nasstar have engaged regularly over the last four years about re-scaling the LSM service. Due to a requirement for the reduction in the utilisation of the service and with an appetite for the rail industry to remove the use of paper ticketing over some time, Nasstar provided RDG several key opportunities that would enhance efficiency, cost, and performance - one of which was the database migration for an AWS Aurora Database. Since the migration, we have noticed cost savings and a 10% transactional performance improvement. Together with this change being an enabler for other service improvements, it also future-proofs the RDG environment."
Simon Wright
Director, Core Operations
•Rail Delivery Group
