Aerocloud
AeroCloud is an ambitious scaleup with the goal of bringing their cloud-native, intelligent airport management solutions to the world. Using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, they had multiple wins in the US and Europe but needed an architecture with better scalability.
- Increased scalability with containerisation, reducing reliance on EC2 and avoiding future large-scale migrations.
- Improved IAM and compliance using AWS Landing Page Accelerators to strengthen access control and support ISO27001 certification.
- Simplified operations by eliminating the maintenance burden of self-managed landing pages and containerisation.
- Freed developers and engineers to focus on enhancing AeroCloud’s products and services instead of infrastructure upkeep.
- Enabled easier customer onboarding with containerisation and automatic scaling to match resource demands.
AeroCloud needed scalability to hit target
AeroCloud launched in 2019 to provide airport management solutions using cloud technology that would deliver better support for airports than legacy systems. The company offers a range of services, including an airport operations system (AOS)—a comprehensive suite of modules such as flight management, gate management, and flight information displays—designed to streamline various aspects of airport operations. They also offer passenger processing solutions—tools to facilitate efficient passenger handling—and AeroCloud Optic, a passenger tracking and counting technology that offers real-time insights into passenger movement throughout the airport. Within six years of launch, AeroCloud had won business with more than 50 airports in the US, UK, and Europe, and wanted to realise further expansion opportunities.
To help them achieve that “more”, AeroCloud understood they couldn’t continue the way they had been operating. While their solutions worked well, their model would not scale to meet the company’s ambitious target of being in 850 airports by 2028. They needed a platform that could manage the increase in demand. The company began looking at application modernisation and rearchitecture towards a serverless architecture to support their expanding customer base. The challenge was that AeroCloud had limited resources, with their developers and engineers focused on updating existing services and developing new ones. To rearchitect the system would have taken resources away from the core business or required hiring an additional team.
Steamhaus expertise to meet needs at speed
AeroCloud had previously worked with Steamhaus and knew that they needed a partner that could translate their existing products and help reimagine them for the future. The first step was a discovery phase, in which Steamhaus and AeroCloud teamed up to get a clear understanding of how AeroCloud worked. What they discovered was an architecture that created new Amazon EC2 instances for each new airport, which meant that adding new customers was resource intensive. The process needed to be streamlined.
Both parties agree that it was essential to work together to ensure that the end results would align with AeroCloud’s needs and growth ambitions. The two companies worked closely together, with the AeroCloud team sharing their industry knowledge with Steamhaus. Using that knowledge and deep AWS expertise, Steamhaus was able to suggest a course of action that would, within two months, get the initial transformation up and running.
AeroCloud adopts new architecture with no downtime
The first step in creating a new working environment for AeroCloud was to develop a Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS. This brings foundational capabilities that are in line with AWS best practices as well as a range of global compliance frameworks. It also helps manage a multi-account environment that provides strong identity and access management. This was important to AeroCloud as part of their growth plan is to achieve an ISO 27001—an international standard for information security management. Starting with a sound foundation ensured that these controls would be integrated into the new approach.
AeroCloud and Steamhaus then worked on containerising AeroCloud’s offerings, moving them out of individual EC2 instances. The benefit of containerisation is that it makes testing and deploying applications faster and more efficient and ensures they can run in different environments, giving the company flexibility for the future. Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a managed container orchestration service, was selected due to its ease of deployment and maintenance.
To ensure that services to customers would not be interrupted, the new environment was built separately from existing AeroCloud systems. This allowed the company to get everything in place before moving any customers onto the architecture.
AeroCloud can now focus on developing their services to customers without having to devote large amounts of resources to onboarding new ones. They also have the scalability to onboard clients without requiring additional staff. Though the daily operation of the systems are fully in-house at AeroCloud, Steamhaus is still working with the company, providing advisory services as needed.
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AeroCloud is a technology company specialising in cloud-native, intelligent airport management solutions. Their platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to provide real-time analytics, automate tasks, and enhance collaboration among airport stakeholders. AeroCloud’s market share has been steadily ramping up since 2019 and their goal is to become the world's largest airport operations SaaS provider, shaping the sector's future development. The platform currently supports more than 51 customers across the US and Europe, equating to over 200 million passengers annually.Location
Manchester, UKIndustry
Aviation Software
Services
AWS PlatformsMigrate & ModerniseShare
AeroCloud wants to be in every airport
AeroCloud want to continue to grow to their target of being in 850 airports by 2028, up from about 50 now. That means they will need to take on incumbents, offering airports more flexible, efficient systems. Using a containerised solution means that they won’t have any surprises when onboarding a new customer. Previously, bringing on a large customer could result in the team scrambling to increase the resources to meet demand. Now that will automatically scale.
AeroCloud was also facing challenges in scaling their Optic application; a system used by airports to anonymously track and count passengers in real time. Optic was deployed manually to physical edge devices at each airport, often requiring engineers to be on-site for installation and updates. It had become difficult to scale and lacked the automation needed to support further growth.
To address this, Steamhaus designed and implemented a solution that enables remote management, scalable deployment, and automation across edge devices using Amazon IoT Greengrass to manage and deploy machine learning models, application components, and direct updates. The solution also introduced AWS IoT Core (MQTT) as a scalable messaging layer between devices and the customers AWS infrastructure and established secure integration with MongoDB Atlas Vector Search for storing vector embeddings of passenger traces. The solution was wrapped into a reusable bootstrapping pattern using IoT Greengrass and GitHub Actions, which allows AeroCloud to provision and manage devices remotely and consistently across different airport environments.
The current role of Steamhaus is support, where it provides advice and guidance. During the building and handover of AeroCloud’s containerised system, there was a knowledge transfer that allows the company to run things on its own. Going forward, the relationship is ready to spin up even further as AeroCloud’s needs grow, and they get closer to that 850 airports number.
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