Virgin Australia has emerged from the pandemic with new microservices platforms, a new mobile app and a website, having rebuilt its technology stack to overcome legacy debt.
Head of infrastructure and support Simon Lawrence said the “new wave” of transformation had begun in the wake of the airline’s exit from voluntary administration in November 2020.
Work has also ramped up more recently, with “around about 150 IT staff” put on as domestic travel rebounded last year and international borders opened in February.
Qantas has undergone a similar modernisation effort since the pandemic, with many of its long-running IT relationship, including with IBM and Fujitsu, relegated to the scrap heap.
“As we came out of administration, we had quite a legacy tech debt,” Lawrence told the New Relic FutureStack 2022 conference in Sydney on Thursday.
“And we’ve been focusing on modernising those platforms, so picking them up off those and moving them to platforms like Kubernetes in AWS [which] we’re deploying now with New Relic integrated.”
At the front-end, the airline has moved its website from an “older on-prem content management [system] to Adobe Experience Manager.”
“So, we’ve really modernised a lot of those platforms now so that we can build on top of them for a new wave of digital transformation,” Lawrence said.
New Relic embedded in upgraded stack
New Relic is one of a number of new platforms the airline has embedded within its upgraded stack following voluntary administration.
Lawrence said the observability software, which the airline adopted in December 2020, is now “being used pretty much across everything that we’ve rebuilt”.
“It’s been deployed through the [Virgin Australia] mobile app, the website and across a lot of our new microservices platforms as we upgrade those,” he said.
New Relic has also been “built through the design process, through development into support, so through the entire stack”, helping to ensure that new deployments work.
“So, it plays a bit role through the whole process, but importantly – in my space – it really means we can know those issues before the customers or guests do,” he said.
In the case of the mobile app, Lawrence said the team was able to “find issues” ahead of time or identify previously unknown device compatibility issues experienced by users.
New Relic has also been helpful for the business more broadly, allowing it to understand how sales and promotions have performed.
“The one that stood out for me is we came out of the pandemic and we ran our first sale, and the website got largely overwhelmed,” Lawrence said.
“The next day we were able to work with New Relic and get instrumented pretty quickly, so a day or two it took us to instrument it end-to-end from the older on-prem servers through.
“And we were able to then figure out exactly where that was causing issues and we’ve identified a lot of legacy integrations... were actually slowing down the site.
“So, it proved its worth then and we’ve since rolled it out across as many things as we could as we’ve been upgrading and moving forward.”
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