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Rail Delivery Group (RDG) provides the essential services and support needed to help its members succeed, from national ticketing and reservations to information systems for passengers and staff. A key part of this is the Live Sales Management (LSM) database, which has long been hosted on AWS EC2 instances. While the system performed well, it presented limitations during failure events and required ongoing manual management.
RDG identified an opportunity to modernise its LSM database by improving fail over and replication capabilities, while also reducing support overheads. Migrating to Amazon Aurora, a fully managed cloud-native Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS),would provide a more scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient solution.
"RDG and Colibri have engaged regularly over the last four years about re-scaling the LSM service. Due to a requirement for the reduction in the utilisation of the service and with an appetite for the rail industry to remove the use of paper ticketing over a period of time, Colibri provided RDG a number of key opportunities that would enhance efficiency, cost, and performance - one of which was the database migration for an AWS Aurora Database. Since the migration, we have noticed cost savings and a 10% transactional performance improvement. Together with this change being an enabler for other service improvements, it also future-proofs the RDG environment. "
To identify the best migration path, Colibri carried out a detailed assessment of available database migration strategies. AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) was selected as the most secure and efficient tool to support the move from EC2-hosted MySQL to Amazon Aurora.
Key considerations during the planning phase included:
Colibri used the AWS DMS pre-migration assessment tool to identify potential issues early and shape the overall migration plan. This helped inform the configuration and any required changes ahead of time.
Before moving to production, the migration was rehearsed across multiple test environments. These rehearsals validated Infrastructure-as-Code deployments, ensured data consistency, tested the AWSDMS process, and confirmed Aurora could handle both standard and peak usage levels.
Since migrating to Amazon Aurora in November 2021, RDG has gained a number of key business and technical advantages:
Reliability: Managed backups, routine patching, and improved replication have significantly reduced risk and removed legacy technical debt.
Resilience: Outage recovery time has improved dramatically, dropping from around 30 minutes to just 80 seconds.
Cost reduction: Operational overheads have been lowered by replacing self-managed infrastructure with a managed cloud-native solution.
Performance: Aurora delivers better performance at scale compared to the previous EC2-based setup.
Observability: With CloudWatch metrics, alarms, and Performance Insights, RDG now has greater visibility and control over database performance.
Colibri’s support has enabled RDG to modernise a critical part of its infrastructure, ensuring that its ticketing and sales systems are more resilient, cost-effective, and future-ready.
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