Owning Outcomes in Aviation Technology with 30% Faster Deployments

About the Client

The client is a global leader in in-flight entertainment and communications technology, serving airlines with customized solutions that span design, engineering, and installation. Its application estate had grown across multiple on-premises data centers, supporting a business that sits at the intersection of passenger experience, airline operations, and real-time connectivity.

This is important because Aviation technology providers now operate in a market where airlines expect faster feature releases, reliable integration, stronger cybersecurity, and systems that can keep pace with rising passenger expectations. For the client, that meant legacy applications were starting to affect the business's ability to respond, scale, and modernize.

Many of those applications were built on older technology stacks and fragmented database architectures. As costs rose and growth demands increased, the client needed a more agile foundation that could support modernization without losing control over performance, security, or operational efficiency. 

Business Challenges

The client was trying to modernize in an environment where legacy applications were hindering speed, scalability, and cost efficiency across a business that needed to support growth and respond faster to airline demands.

Many of these applications were 5 to 10 years old, spread across multiple on-premises data centers, and built on outdated architectures that were becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain.

Key challenges included:

• On-premises infrastructure was costly and hard to scale: Monolithic applications drove high server costs while limiting the flexibility to scale when business demand increased. 

• Release cycles were slowing the speed to market: Complex release management and planning made deployments slower and reduced the client’s ability to respond quickly. 

• Database architectures were fragmented: Multiple database schemas across platforms created complexity and made modernization harder to execute cleanly. 

• Legacy design limited the modernization scope: The existing application landscape constrained agility and made it harder to migrate to a more scalable cloud-ready model. 

• Monitoring costs were rising: Local monitoring tools added license overhead without delivering the observability needed for a more modern operating model. 

• Secrets and sensitive configurations needed stronger protection: Security risks around credentials and configuration management had to be addressed as part of any serious cloud move.

LTM’s Solution

LTM did not start with migration. It applied Business Creativity: A blend of human insights and intelligent systems.

Before moving workloads, our team ran a structured 10-week assessment across 20 applications using proprietary questionnaires, CAST Highlight, and Infinity Insights.

That gave the client a clearer view of modernization readiness, technical complexity, and migration priority. Based on that assessment, six applications were selected for migration to AWS. From there, the work focused on reshaping the application estate for faster scale and cleaner operations, not just changing where it ran.

• Containerized application modernization on AWS: LTM re-platformed the selected applications as Docker containers on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), with Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) mount volumes for storage. This addressed the limits of monolithic, on-premises applications and created a more flexible base for scaling. 

• Database migration to a more unified cloud platform: Associated databases were migrated to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB to improve scalability and reliability while reducing fragmentation across environments. 

• Automated provisioning and release pipelines: LTM used AWS CloudFormation templates to automate infrastructure provisioning and GitLab continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to streamline deployments. This gave the client a more repeatable and controlled way to release changes across applications. 

• Stronger observability with lower tooling overhead: Applications were onboarded to Amazon CloudWatch, Prometheus, and Grafana to improve monitoring visibility while reducing dependency on local licensed monitoring tools. 

• Security controls built into the new environment: To strengthen protection around sensitive configurations, our team externalized secrets and credentials into AWS Secrets Manager, improving security and operational hygiene. 

• Documentation and delivery discipline across teams: LTM produced detailed architecture documentation, database schemas, runbooks, deployment methodologies, and migration strategies. Cloud architects, database administrators, quality engineers, and client subject matter experts (SMEs) worked together throughout the program to keep the transition smooth and execution quality high.

All of this gave the client a more dependable path to modernize aviation applications without turning the program into a risky, one-shot migration.

Business Benefits

The migration gave the client a more efficient, scalable, and better-governed application foundation for future modernization on AWS. 

• 20–25% lower infrastructure costs: Reduced run costs compared with on-premises applications, improving the economics of modernization at scale. 

• 50–60% faster scalability: Containerized applications on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) scaled in minutes instead of hours, helping teams respond faster to operational demand. 

• 30% faster deployments: Automated infrastructure provisioning and GitLab continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines improved release speed and operational efficiency. 

• Stronger security for sensitive configurations: Moving secrets and credentials to AWS Secrets Manager improved control over application security and reduced operational risk. 

• Better observability with lower tooling overhead: Amazon CloudWatch, Prometheus, and Grafana improved monitoring visibility while reducing dependence on licensed local monitoring tools. 

• High-quality execution with smoother delivery: The migration program was completed without escalations, reflecting tighter coordination across cross-functional teams and client SMEs.

Conclusion

Modernization mattered here because the client could no longer afford applications that scaled slowly, cost too much to run, and made every release harder than it should be.

By assessing what to move, re-platforming the right workloads, and rebuilding the surrounding deployment, monitoring, and security model on AWS, LTM helped the client create a cleaner path forward.

The result is a stronger application foundation that supports faster scale, better control, and more confident modernization across its aviation technology estate.

Ready to reframe legacy aviation applications for faster scale, lower cost, and stronger control?

Contact us at aws.communications@ltm.com to see how LTM can help you Outcreate aviation agility on AWS.