Iberia migrates website successfully using AWS Countdown Premium

As part of a multi-year cloud program, Iberia needed to migrate its customer-facing website, its primary sales channel, to the cloud. After previous migrations led by third parties missed deadlines, the company wanted greater control over the project, which involved modernizing application servers, Java libraries, and .NET frameworks, while introducing containerized infrastructure for the first time.

During the migration, coordinating more than 300 developers, product owners, and scrum teams was a significant challenge. Moreover, missing the scheduled cutover could delay the migration by six months, and downtime would negatively impact revenue. To mitigate those risks, the company wanted expert support and real-time guidance to ensure a smooth transition. It also aimed to help personnel build their cloud skills for future cloud migrations and modernizations. Haseeb Ur Khan Khatoon, senior products support lead at Iberia, says, “We were looking for expertise, responsiveness, and guidance.”

To gain proactive guidance required for a business-critical cutover, Iberia turned to AWS Countdown Premium. The service included access to AWS specialists, proven runbooks, and decision templates to streamline planning, execution, and monitoring. It also provided 24/7 access to an assigned technical team to provide coverage during the migration for faster resolution. “The comprehensive support from AWS Countdown Premium gave us a lot of confidence in the success of such a high-profile migration,” says Haseeb Ur Khan Khatoon.

Countdown technical specialists worked closely with Iberia’s product managers, cloud engineers and developers, reviewing design configurations for services new to Iberia, such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). The company containerized workloads on Amazon EKS to modernize its application architecture and improve scalability for its customer-facing website and moved databases to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for automated management of backups, scaling, and patching. At the same time, it upgraded from Windows Server 2012 to Windows Server 2022 with the .NET Framework 4.5.

To coordinate progress across multiple workstreams, Iberia attended weekly cadence meetings with AWS experts, where teams reviewed milestones, addressed technical questions, and strengthened AWS knowledge. “Working closely with the AWS Countdown team helped us build practical knowledge we can apply to future migrations and modernizations,” comments Haseeb Ur Khan Khatoon.

During the early morning hours of the cutover in April 2025, Iberia encountered an unexpected auto-scaling configuration issue that posed a potential risk to migration . Relying on its 24/7 access to AWS experts, Iberia contacted the AWS Countdown Premium team immediately. “Overnight, AWS Countdown Premium connected us with an Amazon EKS expert in minutes. The expert reviewed Karpenter logs, identified the issue, and provided a clear fix, keeping our migration on track,” remembers Haseeb Ur Khan Khatoon.

As part of its full IT migration to AWS, Iberia successfully completed the cutover of its flagship Iberia.com website with virtually zero service disruption. In total, the company has migrated 1,638 servers, 1,235 databases, and 572 applications to modern microservices cloud architectures. Similar to other systems — such as its maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) operations — now running on AWS, the website saw a tenfold increase in deployment frequency, a 40 percent decrease in development cycle times, and a 38 percent drop in error rates.

Following the successful migration, Iberia accelerated the adoption of AI to enhance the website experience. Using Amazon Bedrock, it created a sophisticated generative AI travel assistant chatbot for the “Mi Iberia” section, offering personalized trip recommendations based on customer profiles and preferences. Iberia has also implemented a new automated operational model to manage over 200 AWS accounts and more than 2,000 AWS resources, enhancing governance, agility, and visibility across teams. Says Haseeb Ur Khan Khatoon, “Although it’s early days, we are exploring new ideas with AWS.