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Over 10 years ago, Flightright’s founder found himself stuck in an airport. Thus began the decade-long campaign to tackle the lack of customer representation for flight cancellations. The traditional approach of visiting a lawyer was a major obstacle to most people; furthermore, airline companies would often crush individual compensation attempts under the heel of lengthy court cases. As a result, most affected customers never received fair compensation. Since then, Flightright has proven itself a legaltech force to be reckoned with, today having enforced over €430 million in repayments and establishing the Flightright Group.
Flightright’s free and clear checking tool sits at the heart of its accessibility. Customers can quickly check whether their ticket is entitled to refund or compensation, before experienced legal teams step in to guide the compensation process. Whether the weather grounded a plane, or strikes left customers stuck on the ground, Flightright’s wealth of data allows for compensation analysis in a matter of seconds. Tracking over 80 million data points, daily flight information allows for granular clarity into each delay, while claims can remain valid for up to 6 years after the flight date.
The Challenge
Flights aren’t the only point of concern Flightright has to include in their analysis: city department guidance, prior legal cases, and employee strike action all play a role in case validity. With a techstack based solely on AWS, every datapoint was swelling already-bloated databases, data warehouses, and lookup tables. In response to this, on-demand instances seemed like the easiest approach. However, the often over-provisioned nature of EC2 instances meant that the high peaks of Flightright’s database were pushing costs to ever-higher altitudes. The sheer scale of Flightright’s databases – and the speed of its growth – had resulted in patchy implementation processes that were beginning to tumble out of control.
Reflecting the lack of streamlined AWS oversight, different teams had begun to rely on their own individual instances. While development was hard at work with the fantastic tools provided by AWS, a lack of overarching optimization threatened to further entrench the company within inefficient habits. These structural issues had enjoyed years of unchecked growth – understandably so, as Flightright CTO Marco Kaiser points out, “you don’t do cloud optimization every day… at some point you lose focus”. It was time for Flightright’s turbulent cloud implementation to receive some much-needed course correction.
The Solution
This optimization would need to operate off real-time statistics, without drawing resources away from day-to-day operations and while fitting in smoothly with its surrounding tech stack. Scouring our wealth of cloud partners, we found the perfect solution: an optimization tool that automatically scales EC2 resources to precisely match the organization’s actual usage. “The offer from GlobalDots was just too good,” Marco explained.
At its core, cloud inefficiency is caused by a mismatch between a company’s cloud budget and their true usage. The allocation of fixed cloud resources often bloats budgets and complexity thanks to unused resources – even over 3 or 4 accounts, the cost of unoptimized storage can rapidly add up. On the other hand, the most flexible AWS services – on-demand instances – come with hefty price tags. While this often lose-lose pricing model was once accepted, GlobalDots’ industry expertise offers a new approach.
AWS’ inbuilt scaling simply wasn’t providing enough flexibility, and a more granular form of on-demand instance management was necessary.
The solution provides Flightright’s database with precisely the necessary resources, selling unused RIs and proactively covering any peaks
This solution sits adjacent to both Flightright’s real-time data usage and AWS’ own marketplace, tracking all usage metrics and Reserved Instances (RI) sale prices. These streams of data are fed into a machine learning model that creates a behavior profile, tracking how infrastructural demand fluctuates over time. This behavior is then mapped onto RI sale prices. When an upcoming change in capacity is flagged, the model issues an API command to the AWS platform, which then scales capacity via discounted RIs. This provides enterprises with the costing structure of reserved instances and the flexibility of On-Demand. Offering the most lucrative form of instance management, this solution provides Flightright’s database with precisely the necessary resources, selling unused RIs and proactively covering any peaks.
Once GlobalDots had established the perfect solution, it was time to begin implementation. From Flightright’s perspective, all that was necessary was a few clicks. All in a day’s worth of work, implementation was provided via our transparent and professional solution engineers.
The added value of GlobalDots
Marco remarks on the rapid setup time, recognizing how Flightright is in good hands. Post-implementation, he points out that they continue to receive support throughout, with one key differentiation: “GlobalDots doesn’t try to sell me more products…it’s a very professional relationship”
The result
Saving roughly €30,000 a year in engineer fees alone represents a major benefit, but the savings enjoyed by Flightright extend far beyond financial. An incredible amount of time and resources were freed up throughout the process; the solution itself, for instance, removes the demand to hire and train new staff members. At the same time, GlobalDots’ managed implementation saved significant self-setup time, sparing the inhouse dev team from having to leaf through each piece of documentation and best practice.
But the benefits go deeper: GlobalDots’ industry expertise helped proactively address structural inefficiencies that otherwise would have weighed down Flightright’s soaring success. In Marco’s words, “This [structural focus] is why I would recommend even a new company to partner with GlobalDots”.
Flightright represents one success story out of the thousands that we’re deeply proud of. Our industry-leading expertise builds upon our 95-strong partner portfolio, spanning cloud management, development, security and more. Our daily research into emerging technologies allows us to filter out the noise and holistically provide the highest-value solutions for every business use case. The support we offer – from discovery to implementation and beyond – allows us to provide cutting-edge solutions for AppsFlyer, SentinelOne, Lufthansa, and more.
To discover the full potential of your own organization’s cloud infrastructure, get in touch today.