Creating Bespoke Middleware to Digitalize an Airline’s Operations

Location

United States

Industry

Client

A newly launched, US-based airline offering charter flights to short- and medium-haul destinations, aiming to be a cloud-based and entirely paperless business. As a startup, their business model lent itself well to fully digitalized operations.

Challenge

As an airline, the client uses various services provided by various vendors to conduct its business. To achieve their digital-first aspirations, they knew they needed a custom-built interface to reconcile data from multiple aviation software products. This would save time by allowing them to automate common tasks and would enable them to easily connect new system data, significantly minimizing onboarding friction and facilitating scalability. This latter factor was especially crucial as the company has ambitious growth plans and needed flexible IT to expand alongside its physical assets without the disruption that often occurs during these phases. Scalability was a key requirement for this project.

Solution

The dedicated team built bespoke middleware to reconcile different data sets and help the client easily conciliate various system data. It was built using Node.js and deployed on AWS as Lambda functions using Serverless Framework.

Starting with setting up the CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions, the team then used the built-in secrets to manage the repository’s sensitive information.

The project team used easy-soap-request to handle SOAP requests in JavaScript. By creating custom wrapper functions around the library interface and using the xml2js library to easily convert XML to JSON and vice versa, it was possible to edit SOAP requests; make SOAP calls by specifying the endpoint, action, and request; and use SOAP responses in code.

To minimize run times and costs for the airline, the project team leveraged the built-in asynchronous computing in JavaScript to make simultaneous calls and reduce dependencies between data operations.

Achievements

Custom-built middleware using open-source technology to ensure continued in-house maintenance and easy access to support
Bespoke aviation middleware built in six months, from discovery to deployment

Impact

Efficiency was a key driver for this project. By minimizing dependencies and creating asynchronous code, we sped up the execution of functions from minutes to mere seconds – saving the client days in lost productivity over a year.

Due to the groundwork laid in Serverless, once we had access to the third-party systems, we were able to quickly create and deploy functions that started communicating with them. This meant that deploying to production was a quick and easy task that could be replicated by the in-house team at speed. With automation set up throughout the pipeline, the in-house team saves hours on regular maintenance and updates, allowing them to focus on scaling alongside the business.

Technology

AWS

Node.js

JavaScript

Lamba

Serverless

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