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Rail Settlement Plan Limited (RSP) delivers essential services such as ticketing, travel information, and refund processing on behalf of its member companies. The Live Sales Management (LSM) platform (hosted on AWS and managed by Colibri) supports National Rail’s Ticket on Departure service, enabling customers to purchase tickets online or via third parties and collect them at their convenience.
A core component of LSM is its reconciliation process, which compares ticket sales with actual ticket issuance. This provides RSP and its retailers with vital data to accurately calculate profit and loss from ticket sales.
During a routine service review, Colibri identified several risks within the LSM reconciliation process that could compromise the platform’s security and reliability. The Reconciliation Risk Removal project was launched to address these issues and ensure continued operational stability. Key risks included:
Each of these posed a significant threat to the reconciliation process, potentially causing failures or delays in report generation. Such disruptions could have serious consequences for ticket retailers and train operating companies across the UK.
"RDG and Colibri have worked closely together for several years, consistently delivering solutions that strengthen and enhance the LSM processes. The goal of this project was to reduce risk, improve flexibility, boost efficiency and performance, manage costs, and future-proof the platform for RDG’s LSM service. This kind of innovative thinking and expert guidance is why we continue to trust Colibri with our cloud infrastructure. The reconciliation process is a critical part of the service we deliver to our customers, and this migration has not only lowered our costs but also increased visibility and opened the door to new opportunities. It has also improved efficiency and reporting capabilities across the TOC and TIS communities."
Colibri’s in-depth analysis revealed that re-platforming the existing codebase, alongside updating the underlying AWS infrastructure, would effectively resolve all identified risks, without causing service disruption.
To ensure a seamless transition, the team designed and managed a carefully orchestrated migration, implementing the following key changes:
Infobright database: Migrated all reporting data to an AWS Aurora MySQL Serverless instance for improved performance and supportability.
AWS access keys: Replaced access keys with instance-based permissions across all LSM components, significantly reducing security risk.
AWS SDK: Repackaged the reconciliation code to ensure all AWS interactions used the latest SDK versions, improving compatibility and resilience.
SFTP server: Enhanced the isolation of the SFTP service within LSM, paving the way for a full rebuild (handled separately as part of an ongoing project).
EMR/HIVE: Upgraded from a legacy EMR image, including removal of deprecated roles, to ensure continued support and improved processing of large data sets.
These updates strengthened the LSM reconciliation process, enhancing its security, stability, and future readiness.
Beyond resolving the identified risks, the new solution significantly enhanced security, performance, resilience, and cost-efficiency.
Reliability
Migrating the Infobright reporting database from a hosted EC2 instance to AWS Aurora MySQL Serverless eliminated infrastructure, OS, and database risks. As a serverless model, it also reduced costs by charging only for usage.
Resilience
The move to serverless Aurora simplified disaster recovery, cutting Return-to-Operation time from over 12 hours to just 30 minutes in the event of a service failure.
Security
Replacing access keys with instance role permissions reduced the risk of credential exposure. Increased isolation of the SFTP service further improved overall system security and provided flexibility for future enhancements.
Cost reduction
Decommissioning the EC2-hosted Infobright instance and adopting a serverless, event-driven architecture lowered licensing and support costs. The EMR upgrade also led to a notable reduction in compute expenses.
Performance
Optimisations reduced EMR processing times by approximately 2 hours and cut report processing by 3–4 hours. Overall, the full reconciliation process now runs in 2–3 hours, down from 8–9.
Observability
Amazon CloudWatch was implemented to provide real-time monitoring, alerts, and detailed performance metrics. The restructured code also supports improved auditing and traceability across the platform.
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