Comair: Taking off into the digital future with Google Cloud
About Comair
South Africa-based Comair is one of the largest airline operators in Southern Africa, transporting 4.5 million passengers annually. It operates the British Airways franchise in the region and low-cost airline Kulula. It also offers other travel-related services.
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About Teraflow
Google Cloud partner Teraflow AI focuses on implementing and scaling artificial intelligence models.
Comair migrated from a legacy labor-intensive on-premises stack to Google Cloud within six months, creating an economic, scalable, future-proof business in the process.
Google Cloud results
- Migrates Comair’s full production stack to Google Cloud within six months
- Decreases compute resource usage by 50%
- Running processes around 70% faster than the previous on-premises architecture
- Cutting data-center operating costs by up to 80%
Cuts costs and optimizes processes after Google Cloud migration
The global travel industry has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, but as countries open up, the sector and its customers are thrilled to be going places once again. With aerospace company Boeing forecasting that Africa’s airlines will require 1,030 new airplanes by 2040, valued at $160 billion, opportunities abound in this region. One of the largest airline operators in Southern Africa, Comair is well placed to help the area’s travel sector reach its sky-high goals.
“Comair offers airline services across Southern African, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the ocean islands through two distinct but complementary brands,” explains Avsharn Bachoo, Chief Information Officer at Comair. “Kulula.com is our low-cost airline brand, and one of the market leaders in affordable air travel. British Airways is our premium and corporate airline brand that we operate as part of a license agreement. So we offer something for everyone in the region.”
With various COVID-19-related lockdowns grounding its aircraft on the runway, Comair concentrated on updating its systems so that it would be ready to impress its increasingly digitally savvy customers as they returned to the skies. “We were challenged to completely rethink our operations for the digital age, and we needed to replace our outdated legacy on-premises architecture, which was struggling to cope with our workload,” says Bachoo.
“We assessed each potential cloud provider for security, compute, processing power, and storage. Google Cloud proved to run on average 70% faster than our on-premises systems, using fewer cores and less RAM. Plus, it supported a multitude of open-source applications, and crucially we saw it could be trusted.”
—Avsharn Bachoo, Chief Information Officer, ComairUpgrading to a cloud solution
To achieve this, Comair had to migrate most of its systems from its on-premises solution to the cloud, which would provide a more flexible dynamic platform for its ambitious plans. As Comair’s technology stack supports everything from financial data, secure customer records, and airplane navigation information, it was crucial that it chose a cloud provider that it could trust to secure all of its data and processes.
“We work on a strong model of trust,” reiterates Bachoo. “If we don’t have clear control of our systems it can be serious enough to cause a fatality. Every piece of hardware and software that we use has to be 100% tested.”
Prior to its move to the cloud, Comair relied on six on-premises data centers, which were labor intensive and nearing the end of their usability. It compiled a proof of concept (POC) with which to judge potential cloud providers. “We assessed each potential cloud provider for security, compute, processing power and storage. Google Cloud proved to run on average 70% faster than our on-premises systems, using fewer cores and less RAM. Plus, it supported a multitude of open-source applications, and crucially, we saw it could be trusted,” reveals Bachoo.
Taking off on Google Cloud
Comair began migrating its systems to Google Cloud in March 2020 and by August that year it had moved its full production stack over to Google Cloud; it would have been even quicker if the company did not have to navigate various lockdowns along the way.
Comair enlisted the help of Google Cloud partner Teraflow.ai to help with its move to Google Cloud. Bachoo says: “Our strong partnership with Teraflow.ai, who empowers enterprises through AI-driven solutions, has allowed us to drive key strategic IT and digital transformation efforts. From migration and management of our Cloud Ops on Google's Cloud platform, to building and managing our DataOps, the results have been favorable. We have also worked with them to modernize our capabilities in machine learning, reviving core applications into a micro-serviceable, containerized architecture stretching from back end to the passenger front end (app, web, etc.).”
Comair now runs 70% of its business on Google Cloud, and it uses some other cloud providers for applications that run on parent clouds. It also has a few legacy and client applications that remain on-premises because they have a single code base in a single database and will take a little longer to redevelop for the cloud.
“The plan was always to stick with a hybrid-cloud approach, but we expect to eventually be a fully cloud-centric company and have 80% of our work on Google Cloud. We’ve already migrated all of our tier-one systems over. Our booking platform, our ecommerce platform, all our travel businesses, our loyalty program, and our partner systems are now on Google Cloud,” says Bachoo.
“Rather than simply lifting and shifting into the cloud, Google Cloud has helped us rethink our architecture and our entire communications ecosystem so that everything works in harmony. It’s all in the details. For example, we can now trigger push notifications using the Google Cloud middleware and streaming service Pub/Sub.”
—Avsharn Bachoo, Chief Information Officer, ComairPowering up with Compute Engine
Around 90% of Comair’s Google Cloud operations, including all its virtual machines (VM) and storage offerings, are now powered by Compute Engine. “We use VMs to host our applications, and now we are moving our service databases from native SQL to the fully managed Cloud SQL. This means that more of our services are automated, freeing up our IT team for other work,” says Bachoo.
To build and run its mobile applications and analyze the data it collects from them, Comair is using Firebase on the Google Cloud, which syncs to Flutter, the UI toolkit for developing apps for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. And, as Comair has to meet stringent governance requirements, it uses the fully managed data backup as a service solution HYCU in partnership with Google Cloud.
“The next step is to migrate our tier-two operations, our finance, and HR applications over to Google Cloud. For this, we will use the business insights and monitoring tools in the operations suite,” adds Bachoo. “And we’re looking at using Cloud Run to help us to scale more flexibly and to optimize our development systems with DevOps.
“Google Cloud enables us to optimize our costs and has given us a technology stack that scales up and down in line with demand. Previously, if we had an offer on, often our infrastructure couldn't keep up with the volume of sales. Now we seamlessly scale up for busy periods.”
—Avsharn Bachoo, Chief Information Officer, ComairFlying into the digital world
All these tools are helping the 78-year-old airline transform on both the strategic and operations fronts into a futuristic digital organization, ready to make the most of social and mobile communications and data analytics. “Rather than simply lifting and shifting into the cloud, Google Cloud has helped us rethink our architecture and our entire communications ecosystem so that everything works in harmony. It’s all in the details. For example, we can now trigger push notifications using the Google Cloud middleware and streaming service Pub/Sub,” says Bachoo.
Even with these additional benefits, the airline’s monthly operating costs are now about a fifth of what they were for its previous on-premises architecture and it is now far quicker and easier for it to scale its various operations too. “Google Cloud enables us to optimize our costs and has given us a technology stack that scales up and down in line with demand. Previously, if we had an offer on, often our infrastructure couldn't keep up with the volume of sales. Now we seamlessly scale up for busy periods,” explains Bachoo.
Comair is using less processing power too. Its billing system, for example, was using 32 core and 256 gigabytes of RAM. Now that it is running in Google Cloud, it uses 6 core and 32 gigabytes of RAM. Bachoo says: “We’ve reduced our core usage by more than half and our RAM use by about 50%, which again helps us reduce costs and makes us more sustainable.”
With its infrastructure optimized for the opportunities that the twenty-first century affords, Comair is now all set to make the most of its data. “We're starting to build a data foundation built on AI and machine learning that will open up more opportunities for us and improve our customers’ experience. It will mean that we can analyze consumer data on an ongoing basis to create more personalized products and services and new opportunities for cross-selling. Google Cloud has created a lot of exciting openings for us,” Bachoo concludes.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Comair
South Africa-based Comair is one of the largest airline operators in Southern Africa, transporting 4.5 million passengers annually. It operates the British Airways franchise in the region and low-cost airline Kulula. It also offers other travel-related services.
About Teraflow
Google Cloud partner Teraflow AI focuses on implementing and scaling artificial intelligence models.