TUI Poland Migrates to AWS with Help from Tameshi for Reliability and Faster Release Times

Migrating TUI Poland’s Website for Reliability and Scalability

TUI Poland, part of the global TUI Group travel and hotel agency, turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AWS Partner Tameshi to migrate its website from a hybrid infrastructure and onto the cloud. It was experiencing unplanned downtime, some in its commercially vital high season, so needed better reliability, scalability, and an improved backup and data recovery system located in another region. Since the migration, website downtime has been virtually eliminated and response times are faster, even as it manages 20 percent more customers. Half of its workloads now run on microservices. And software releases that previously took up to 5 hours - requiring overnight work because systems had to be shut down - now happen in the daytime and take 1 hour with zero impact on live systems or website users.

The story

TUI Poland Sp. z o.o. was established in 1997. It is a high-growth part of TUI Group, which is one of the world’s largest tourism operators, with global revenues of €23.2 billion for the year ended 30 September 2024. TUI Group serves 21 million customers a year, providing flights, hotels, holiday packages, and cruises. 

The Polish business had a complex, hybrid infrastructure supporting its website, which regularly experienced unplanned downtime. Apart from better reliability, it also needed improved scalability to manage variations in demand on its site, which saw important peaks The concern was that, if its site was unavailable, customers would go to other travel sites, causing lost revenue for TUI Poland. Any changes made to its systems also had to be integrated with other websites to support the company’s business-to-consumer and business-to-business communications.

TUI Poland’s technology is independent of the global group but must communicate with central databases of prices and holiday availability. The TUI Poland website relied on a core monolithic application, and only about 10 percent of workloads used microservices. This meant that, if problems led to website downtime, it would take 2-3 hours to restore service for customers - a serious issue for a company reliant on web bookings and sales.

There was also an issue with backup systems. Although its main database was in Warsaw, TUI Poland’s backup systems and parts of the database infrastructure were located in southern Poland, in Kraków. Data connectivity problems between the sites frequently led to database crashes, requiring a lot of manual work and several hours for restoration.

Building Reliability with Microservices and Better Backup

For TUI Poland, the most important thing was to build a website that it could depend on. The team had some experience with AWS but lacked the required migration expertise, so it turned to AWS Partner Tameshi. “Tameshi has the expertise and experience we needed to get the best from AWS services,” says Piotr Kempkiewicz, IT manager at TUI Poland. “We had some services on AWS but did not know how to build landing zones and break up the monolithic application to smaller services.”

Despite the site problems it was experiencing, TUI Poland didn’t want to rush the migration. “We didn’t want to do it fast - we wanted to do it right,” says Kempkiewicz.“ We needed to be absolutely sure the application would work properly with no downtime. We started in April 2023 with a planned launch date of December.” But database testing proved unsatisfactory, so systems were reconfigured, retested, and launched in March 2024. The database contains about 4 terabytes of data. It uses Amazon Aurora for fast access, maximum uptime, and multi-regional availability. 

The company’s previous system had about 10 percent of workloads using microservices, but Tameshi worked to bring this up to more than half, which makes it easier to isolate faults if they occur. The release process was also streamlined and improved. The team introduced Amazon OpenSearch Service to provide real-time search, monitoring, and analysis of business and operational data. This was designed to provide TUI Poland with a deeper understanding of its customers while also improving the website user experience and making it easier to discover new destinations and experiences.

Tameshi also set up a backup and data recovery system in an AWS Region outside of Poland, in Dublin, Ireland, to eliminate TUI Poland’s ongoing issues with data connectivity.

Near-Zero Downtime, Faster Response Times, Improved Search

Tameshi now provides 24/7 support for the website and continues to move more workloads to microservices. TUI Poland’s IT team keeps an eye on costs and errors, but has minimal day-to-day site management demands, which frees them up for more strategic work. Most important of all, TUI Poland’s website now sees minimal unplanned downtime, with only one incident since the migration. Software releases that previously required 4-5 hours of overnight downtime are now completed in 1 hour - with no downtime or impact on customers - and can be implemented during the day. 

Systems are instantly scalable and mostly automated. Previously, it took up to 1 hour of scheduled downtime to add capacity. And the website response times for customers have been cut from several seconds to less than 1 second.

With its backup and data recovery system in Ireland, TUI Poland can now carry out a full restore in 6 hours, and restoration for smaller parts of the site is much quicker. Everything is backed up automatically and the company can scale systems at the click of a button if it’s nearing capacity. “We’re really happy with how the project has gone,” says Kempkiewicz.