Transforming infrastructure management using AWS with Gordian

Gordian helps travel companies sell ancillary services, such as seats, bags, and lounge services, through a single API. The company empowers travel sellers to sell 150 million dollars’ worth of ancillary services per year across over 230 airlines.

As Gordian grew, it identified ways to improve performance and efficiency. Scaling its databases became challenging, and network requests were frequently dropped. Additionally, its cloud platform provider’s compute tier options were limited and could become very costly as Gordian scaled.

Gordian saw the opportunity to optimize costs, increase database scalability, and improve network reliability. This would offer the company more control over its infrastructure, helping Gordian to better serve customers and protect revenue. After evaluating several options, the company decided to migrate to AWS.

To keep the business running smoothly during the migration, Gordian had to avoid making major changes to its applications. The most urgent need was for a scalable, PostgreSQL-compatible database. The company selected Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), an easy-to-manage relational database service optimized for total cost of ownership. As a result, the Gordian team migrated data with minimal code changes while off-loading database maintenance tasks, such as backups, updates, and scaling.

Next, the company created a plan to migrate its applications to AWS with minimum disruptions. “Customers shouldn’t need to think about infrastructure—they should simply experience the benefits of higher uptime, increased performance, and a more resilient foundation,” says Rahul Chauhan, staff engineer at Gordian.

For its Docker-based applications, Gordian chose Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service, to reduce the complexity of deployment and scaling. To run these containerized workloads without the need to manage servers, the company adopted AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine. Using this combination, the team could focus on application code instead of infrastructure, which accelerated the migration and lightened the load on the team. “AWS Fargate being serverless meant that there was one less thing that we needed to worry about,” says Jakub Klapacz, staff engineer at Gordian.

“Working alongside AWS has been transformative,” says Patrick Ford, general manager of ancillaries at Gordian. “The deep technical expertise, flexible environment, and focus on security have empowered our engineering teams to move fast and build with confidence. By migrating to AWS, we not only cut costs but also built a more reliable and scalable foundation with advanced security features. This is helping us shape the future of travel technology.”

Over the next several months, the company completed a gradual rollout of the solution, slowly directing more traffic through its AWS infrastructure. “Using AWS helped us quickly prototype solutions and start to build some confidence with the rest of the organization,” says Kevin Mannix, head of engineering at Gordian.

With the right infrastructure in place, Chauhan, Klapacz, and team began an optimization phase. To improve scalability and cost control for its databases, the company implemented Amazon Aurora, which provides high performance and availability at a global scale for PostgreSQL.

Since the migration, Gordian has experienced infrastructure and compute cost savings of up to 50 and 40 percent, respectively, compared with its previous provider—even while steadily growing its traffic. “Using AWS, we finally have the flexibility to control costs intelligently,” says Chauhan. “We can tune our resources for normal operations and still seamlessly scale up to handle traffic spikes when needed.” Additionally, the company increased its database security, running replicas for each database in different regions—something that its previous cloud platform provider didn’t offer.

Using the new infrastructure, Gordian has also achieved greater stability, improving the quality of life for its team members. The company has decreased the number of service issues by 30 percent, so teams can now focus on developing new features rather than spending time troubleshooting. Equally vital is the increase in customer confidence as the company grows. “For a new business, the key focus is growing the customer base and surviving,” says Klapacz. “But eventually, larger customers require stricter third-party vendor onboarding, which wasn’t possible with our previous environment. Using AWS, we can meet those demands and secure future revenue.”

As it continues its optimization journey, Gordian seeks to find more ways to further improve costs and performance, keeping in mind operational simplicity. The company plans to implement AWS Lambda to empower developers to focus solely on code while AWS Lambda handles infrastructure management. Gordian looks forward to exploring other AWS services as well, including Amazon Inspector for automated and continual security assessment at scale.

Through its use of serverless solutions on AWS, Gordian has streamlined infrastructure management while increasing its operational agility. “With the new infrastructure, our team can focus on building new features and products,” says Mannix. “Our infrastructure is a tailwind rather than a headwind.”