Aurionpro Delivering 3x Ticketing Capacity @ 1/2 The Cost

The Company

Aurionpro Solutions (NSE: AURIONPRO) (BSE: 532668) is a global technology solutions leader, powering enterprises with the digital engines necessary to transform their core business. In the transportation industry, Aurionpro’s flagship product, AurionTransit, streamlines transit ticketing, payments, and fleet route planning, visibility, and tracking.  

For over a century, passenger trains have provided the backbone for Indian intercity transportation. During that time, India’s population has grown from 227 million to 1.441 billion people today, and rail capacity has not kept pace with the ever-increasing demand. Additionally, peak holidays and winter festivals travel results in a 6x demand increase.  Consequently, both the public and private sectors have stepped in to provide long-distance bus transportation service that has grown to $6.7B (FY23) in revenue, and that growth rate is on track to surpass India’s US$7.7B (FY23) rail revenue.

Top transportation challenges include out-of-date online schedules, inconsistent mobile and web payment channels, unreliable scheduling, overcrowding, and deferred infrastructure maintenance. Customer satisfaction is low, with 85% of India’s travelers viewing public transportation as inadequate.

With these secular trends as a backdrop, Aurionpro’s client, a prominent Indian Public Transport Corporation, decided to migrate their existing PostgreSQL database to AWS. Additionally, Aurionpro chose Tessell’s Database as a Service (DBaaS) for the database management backplane running on AWS. Tessell's DBaaS, provides automated lifecycle management, performance, and scalability. Today, India’s Public Transport Corporation is running one of the most demanding transactional workloads in the world on Tessell on AWS.

This case study illustrates how Tessell's fully managed PostgreSQL database service on AWS, addresses the core IT and business challenges stemming from an ever-growing seasonal demand. The improved performance, enhanced availability, elasticity, and fleet management have improved customer satisfaction ratings, resulting in increased customer loyalty and repeat bookings.

Customer Overview

Aurionpro’s client, a Public Transport Corporation, manages an extensive network of bus routes, serving millions of passengers daily. The Public Transport Corporation's online booking systems, along with its back-office operations, relied on PostgreSQL databases hosted in a private data center. Inflexible compute infrastructure made servicing India’s 6X peak passenger demand during summer Apr-Jun and holiday travel Oct-Dec inefficient. Systems were either overcapacity during peak times or heavily underutilized during the quiet season.

To address the growing demands for performance, scalability, and high availability, the Public Transport Corporation decided to migrate to Tessell DBaaS on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

‍The Challenges

• Performance Issues: The existing on-premises PostgreSQL database struggled to keep up with the increasing transaction load, leading to slow response times and frequent planned and unplanned downtime. Failed ticket purchases impacted customer satisfaction due to transaction timeouts and overloaded servers.

• High Availability: Ensuring 24/7 availability was paramount, as any system downtime had a direct impact on ticket booking, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiency.

• Scalability: The client needed a solution that could service the growing public transportation demand as well as satisfy peak travel during summer vacation and winter festival seasons.  DBAs struggled to maintain more than 50-60 databases per-person.  

‍The Tessell Solution

The Tessell team embarked on a comprehensive future state architecture accompanied by a TCO demonstrating the benefits of high-performance storage infrastructure for database transaction logs. As a consequence, the customer was able to consolidate 50% of their production database instances and meet seasonal demand through accurate forecasting. The key components of Tessell’s solution included:

Starting the Journey: Seamless Zero Downtime Migration

‍Tessell designed and executed a meticulous migration plan, moving the existing PostgreSQL database to Tessell PostgreSQL while minimizing downtime. This migration was performed without any data loss, ensuring business continuity.

Performance Optimization

‍Tessell fine-tuned the PostgreSQL environment to optimize the performance of the database, enabling it to handle increased transaction loads efficiently, almost 2x the original TPS. Advanced monitoring and auto-scaling capabilities were implemented to ensure that capacity resulted in consistent performance and targeted SLAs.  

Operational & Lifecycle Management

Database patching and upgrade automation accelerated the fleet-wide roll-out of security patches and bug fixes.  Database administrators could finally focus on managing transaction capacity and demand forecasting as opposed to firefighting overloaded servers and recovering failed transactions.  With Tessell's self-service,  production could be cloned into a development instance 60% faster than raising a provisioning ticket.

High Availability

To implement 24/7 availability with a 99.99% uptime SLA, Tessell implemented multi-availability zone deployments, ensuring automatic failover in the event a database fault was detected. The physical separation of availability zones provided greater network, power, and cooling redundancy on which to deploy the highly available PostgreSQL database pairs.

‍The Results

The migration of the PostgreSQL database to Tessell DBaaS on AWS resulted in improved customer satisfaction.  The improved service performance, availability, and elasticity all contributed to eliminating the transaction capacity timeout problems during peak and off-peak seasons.

Improved Performance

The optimized Tessell DBaaS environment led to a 2x boost in database transaction throughput. The online booking system’s increased response time and reduced transaction time-outs significantly reduced failed ticketing transactions.

Enhanced Availability

The implementation of Tessell DBaaS multi-AZ deployments ensured 99.99% high availability.  The high availability nodes also brought planned downtime down to an absolute minimum, rolling cluster patching did not block customers from ticketing transactions - a key client objective.

Scalability

The ability to scale resources on demand enabled the client to efficiently handle peak holiday passenger volumes. During this time, transaction capacity was able to service 2X the baseline transaction demand.

The Business Impact

Tessell’s AWS cloud service positively impacted customer satisfaction by more than 10%, resulting in a repeat booking increase. Improved application performance resulted in a 50% reduction in the application hardware footprint, enabled reliable capacity planning, and reduced hardware costs. Aurionpro forecasting enabled the use of Long-term 3-year reserved instances for constant application demand and pay-as-you-go scale-out infrastructure for peak seasonal ticketing.  

‍Conclusion

Tessell's Database-as-a-Service played a key role, better together with AWS infrastructure, providing a dynamic cost-optimized transformation of Aurionpro’s Public Transport Corporation client.  The technical transformation directly impacted customers with increased satisfaction and repeat business.  As India’s entire transportation system struggled to keep up with demand, Aurionpro’s Public Transport Corporation client’s exceptional metrics are leading the industry into the next 100 years of Indian intercity transportation.