Aviation connectivity firm Gogo takes to the cloud with AWS infrastructure shift


Clare Hopping

14 Mar, 2019

Aviation firm Gogo has decided to migrate its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS), making use of the company’s full suite of cloud services to deliver a better in-flight entertainment experience.

Gogo has already moved the majority of its commercial and business aviation divisions to AWS, but will now start using additional services such as analytics, serverless, database, and storage to engage with more airlines, without needed to upscale its physical infrastructure. It will also provide significant cost savings and improve the efficiency of the company’s current operations compared to using legacy infrastructure.

“The change in velocity that we experienced moving from our on-premises environment to AWS has been phenomenal,” said Ravi Balwada, senior vice president of software development at Gogo.

“By operating and innovating on AWS, we’ve been able to nearly eliminate customer-impacting incidents related to ground-based deployments and increase our deployment cadence sevenfold. And, our database change has made operating at scale much easier and more cost effective.”

As part of the migration, Gogo moved its business-critical databases, including payments, orders, user management, and backend services off legacy databases to Amazon Aurora.

It has also started using AWS Media Elemental Live video processing and delivery to offer on-demand video services to customers and Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Athena data analysis stored in a data lake built on AWS S3.

“Organisations are moving away from legacy infrastructure and database solutions to create cloud environments that give builders freedom and control over their own destinies,” said Mike Clayville, vice president of worldwide commercial sales at AWS said.

“By going all-in, Gogo is leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS services, including comprehensive analytics and machine learning services to gain deeper insights and improve passengers’ in-flight experiences.”