Decreasing Total Cost of Ownership Using Amazon MWAA with Choice Hotels International

Choice Hotels has 22 hospitality brands with more than 7,500 hotels in 46 countries and territories. Since 2018, it has used Apache Airflow, an open-source solution, to orchestrate data and analytics processing and ingestion for the entire enterprise and to schedule jobs on other AWS services. Choice Hotels’ engineers previously self-managed the bespoke Apache Airflow environment, which had scalability issues. Database performance had to be continually monitored, and the environment saw 1-to-2-hour downtimes every quarter. Choice Hotels also wanted to improve access control.

The company jumped at the opportunity to migrate its Apache Airflow directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), or workflows, to Amazon MWAA. “We had already invested in the Apache Airflow system and developed 238 workflows and 17 custom operators,” says Michael Bennett, distinguished software engineer at Choice Hotels. “We were excited to reuse our Apache Airflow knowledge and DAGs in a managed environment.”

Choice Hotels’ migration to Amazon MWAA took 1 month, in June 2021. Choice Hotels first built a proof of concept: it developed a simple custom plug-in to configure its environment so that existing workflows would function on Amazon MWAA. “The proof of concept turned into the final product,” says Bennett. “Our existing DAGs and operators required virtually no changes to be used on Amazon MWAA.”

Choice Hotels uses Amazon MWAA for workflow orchestration with its data pipelines, which includes AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service for discovering, preparing, and integrating data from sources for analytics, machine learning (ML), and application development. The company uses it to visualize, clean, and normalize data from Amazon Redshift, a fast, fully managed cloud data warehouse. Choice Hotels uses Amazon EMR, a cloud big data solution for petabyte-scale data processing, interactive analytics, and ML, to pull data from AWS Glue. The company performs about 9,900 Amazon EMR jobs and 230 AWS Glue jobs per day using Amazon MWAA.

Now, Choice Hotels scales its workloads and clusters as needed, which saves Choice Hotels engineers time and reduces costs and TCO. Before, keeping the environment patched and performing well took 25 percent of a full-time engineer’s time; since the Amazon MWAA implementation, patching has required only rare, brief attention. The company has experienced next to no downtime since the migration. It has resolved workload issues five times faster, a decrease to 1–2 minutes from 10 minutes due to improved logging reliability. Choice Hotels improved security by gaining two-factor authentication, centralized log-in, and the ability to limit access to the right people.