01
Business needs
One of the major American airlines wanted to move their Bag Manager application from Teradata to AWS to:
- Reduce baggage data processing time for immediate consumption and analytics
- Add more checkpoints for bags in transit, for example, scanned, added to storage, loaded/unloaded, etc.
- Mobilize airlines’ ground staff for better management of scheduled flights
- Track changes in the state of the bags
Processed ~60 multi-level nested JSON messages per second with an average size of 80 KB
02
Solution
The Impetus team leveraged Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka (MSK) to process ~60 multi-level nested JSON messages per second with an average size of 80 KB. The solution used Gathr, Impetus’ all-in-one data pipeline platform, for consuming data from Amazon MSK. Apart from processing 20 GB of data per day with ~1,500,000 records, Gathr also helped to:
- Parse and process the message to a structured format for the consumption layer
- Implement CDC with SCD type 1 strategy
A high-level solution architecture diagram is given below:
Highlights
- Designed and implemented a separate pipeline to move historical data to Redshift for deep analytics
- Used hash function at row level to improve SCD-1 performance
- Implemented a utility to merge and compress the small files generated by Gathr on S3
- Employed Gathr health checks to monitor data anomalies and duly report to the users
Reduced baggage data processing time from 20 minutes to real-time
03
Impact
Migrating the baggage tracking application to Amazon MSK helped the airline to:
- Reduce baggage data processing time from 20 mins to real-time for immediate consumption and analytics
- Save cost and time by routing baggage to the right destination in case of misconnects or itinerary change
- Resolve issues quickly in case of misconnects/itinerary changes/flight delays
- Enhance customer experience with real-time baggage tracking
