Cathay Accelerates Projects and Boosts Reliability by Modernizing Critical Applications on AWS

Cathay is a premium travel lifestyle brand based in Hong Kong with around 21,000 employees. The Cathay Group provides passenger and cargo services to around 80 destinations worldwide.

Cathay wanted to enhance customer engagement by fostering a DevOps-driven IT culture and adopting cloud computing on Amazon Web Services (AWS). “We recognized the pivotal role of digital transformation in the travel industry and chose AWS to support our transformation,” says Tony Leung, head of IT Platforms at Cathay. In 2021, Cathay began to modernize its applications on the cloud to leverage autoscaling and auto-recovery capabilities. The app modernization project had clear objectives: enhance scalability, increase resilience, and accelerate time-to-market. To achieve these goals, the company's IT team carefully assessed each application, choosing to refactor the majority into containerized microservices.

Cathay collaborated closely with its Solution Architect and Technical Account Manager from AWS Enterprise Support and the AWS Infrastructure Event Management team to migrate over 90 applications from on-premises Oracle databases and mainframes to AWS. The migration encompassed critical IT systems, including those utilized for aircraft maintenance and ticketing.

Leung says, “AWS provided ongoing support to enhance our automation and infrastructure as code, including swift issue escalation with dedicated teams offering technical guidance and effective workarounds.” The migration was executed in phases, with a full year of continuous monthly cutover dates carefully coordinated with the company's business units.

Cathay adopted Amazon Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) to securely migrate its applications with zero downtime. It also relies on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to operate and autoscale various database engines. The company is currently transitioning from a traditional database engine to open-source cloud databases, such as PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora.

Cathay is also one of the first AWS users of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP as a fully managed shared storage service for its IBM MQ workloads. “Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is easy to use and provides a reliable solution for our high-frequency, high-traffic applications,” Leung shares.

Furthermore, Cathay’s security posture has improved by adopting a zero-trust concept, limiting access with dedicated Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPC) for each application. Additionally, the system encrypts files during transfers between the cloud and on-premises servers, ensuring data remains secure.

The business successfully migrated all targeted applications in two years, staying on budget and on-schedule. Leung says, “The application cutovers were smooth, thanks to all the automations we built into each process. We had tight timelines and hit our goals despite restrictions on resources due to the pandemic, which is a credit to our teams and to AWS.”