Vancouver Airport Authority successfully migrated a self-service border control solution to AWS

How we helped

AWS and Partner Solution

Rackspace Technology was brought on very early to consult on the project and subsequently recommended Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the platform of choice as it met the critical high availability, scalability and security requirements.

After careful analysis, an architecture was designed together with a plan of the deployment phases that included risk identification and mitigation. The plan called for the creation of a staging environment for Proof of Concept (PoC), simulating a fleet of airport kiosks, ensuring that PoC criteria were met, and satisfying all system requirements.

AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is an excellent platform, providing the required security for this workload, using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances for its application and supporting servers. Within AWS EC2, ITS is using Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to automatically distribute incoming traffic between multiple AWS EC2 instances – these EC2 instances form part of Auto-Scaling Groups (ASG) providing the required scalability and fault tolerance. The design also uses multiple Availability Zones (AZ) for additional protection and redundancy of all systems. ITS also uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store backups and Amazon CloudWatch to proactively monitor its EC2 instances through the AWS Management Console and the alerting capability.

ITS is using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for its workload database platform. ITS chose to use AWS RDS for all the advantages offered by a fully managed database platform. Using RDS removes the need to perform typical administrative tasks as well as the complexities of managing a fault-tolerant deployment. ITS uses the RDS service in a Multi-Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) configuration for its redundancy and near-instant failover capability.

ITS is leveraging the disparate AWS regions for disaster recovery with the production systems residing in one region while the disaster recovery systems reside in a different region. In addition, consistency of environments is maintained across regions through the use of AWS CloudFormation templates that define the VPC configuration and resources required.

The environment is mostly Microsoft-based, and several third-party management tools were easily deployed within the AWS environment to manage all remote airport kiosks, providing the platform to scale the tools as the number of kiosks grows over time.

The PoC was followed by a beta period, during which several airports were migrated to AWS and operated there in live production. With that success, all remaining airports were subsequently migrated to the AWS platform. During this project, Rackspace team worked closely with the ITS team guiding them through the process and supporting all manner of requests along the way.